The Riddle of Blackness in England’s National Family Romance

Abstract

Pseudodoxia Epidemica, published in 1646, Sir Thomas Browne describes the cause of blackness as (466). Early modern England's increased contact with Africa and Africans led writers of the period to answer this Riddle with a wide variety of theories concerning the origin of blackness. The proliferation of explanations of blackness in the late sixteenth and early to midseventeenth centuries, like the Elizabethan decrees to expel black people, reveals early modern England's preoccupation with blackness as a marker of difference. Further, as with Oedipus' answer to the riddle posed him by the Sphinx, England's attempts to answer Browne's Riddle of blackness reveal much about England itself. According to early modern writers like George Best (1578), Sir Thomas Herbert (1634), and Sir Thomas Browne (1645), blackness is variously the result of cannibalism (Browne 468), bestiality (Herbert in Jordan 30-31), a genetic disease (Best 262-64; Browne 467), a chemical compound in the blood (Browne 477-78), something in the air, water, or land (Browne 462; 466), or perhaps the power of the mother's imagination during conception or pregnancy (Browne 466-67). The two most popular theories of blackness, however, were the Climate theory and the Biblical theory. The Climate theory states the sun's intensity brings about variations in skin color. As George Best explains it, Others againe imagine the middle Zone to be extreme hot, because the people of Africa, especially Ethiopians, are so cole blacke, and their hair like wooll curled short, which blacknesse and curled haire they suppose to come onely by the parching heat of the Sunne (261). The theory is not Best's own invention, nor does it originate in England. Rather, this theory came to England via classical texts like Pliny's Natural History, which states that the