The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.

The essays of this collection explore how ideas about 'blood' in science and literature have supported, at various points in history and in various places in the circum-Atlantic world, fantasies of human embodiment and human difference that serve to naturalize existing hierarchies.

Foreword: Priscilla Wald Introduction; Kimberly Anne Coles, Ralph Bauer, Carla L. Peterson, and Zita Nunes PART I: RACE AND STOCK 1. Metamateriality and Blood Purity in Cervantes's Alcaná de Toledo; Rachel Burk 2. The Blood of Others: Breeding Plants, Animals, and White People in the Spanish Atlantic; Ruth Hill 3. 'Rude Uncivill Blood': the Pastoral Challenge to Hereditary Race in Fletcher and Milton; Jean Feerick 4. African Blood, Colonial Money, and Respectable Mulatto Heiresses Reforming Eighteenth-Century England; Lyndon Dominique PART II: MORAL CONSTITUTION 5. 'His blood be upon us and upon our children': Medical Theology and the Demise of Jewish Somatic Inferiority in Early Modern England; M. Lindsay Kaplan 6. Sor Juana's Appetite: Body, Mind, and Vitality in 'First Dream'; Anna More 7. Blood and Character in Early African American Literature; Hannah Spahn PART III: MEDICALIZING THE POLITICAL BODY 8. Flowing or pumping? The Blood of the Body Politic in Burton, Harvey, and Hobbes;Robert Appelbaum 9. Linnaeus and the Four Corners of the World; Staffan Müller Wille 10. 'Who Got Bloody?': The Cultural Meaning of Blood during the Civil War and Reconstruction; James Downs 11. Colonial Transfusions: Cuban Bodies and Spanish Loyalty in the Nineteenth Century; David Sartorius