Stereotypes and Stereotyping in Early Modern England: Puritans, Papists and Projectors - Hardcover

by Koji Yamamoto (Editor)

How and why do stereotypes continue affect public life and shape individual experience? This book tackles this question through case studies drawn from early modern England, a society shaken by divisive identity politics and increasingly commercial media. The book ends by exploring implications these case studies for the twenty-first century.

Back Jacket

Early modern stereotypes used to be studied as evidence of popular belief, something mired in prejudices and commonly-held assumptions. Instead, this volume brings together case studies to consider how stereotypes and their mobilisation shaped various negotiations of power in spheres of life such as politics, religion, economy and knowledge production.

Chapters in this volume explore practices of stereotyping as contested processes and draw attention to early modern men and women's remarkable creativity and agency: godly reformers used the 'puritan' stereotype to understand popular aversion to religious discipline; Ben Jonson developed the characters of the puritan and the projector in ways that helped diffuse anxieties about fundamental problems in post-Reformation Church and State; playful allusions to London's 'sin and sea coal' permitted a knowing acceptance of urban growth and its moral and environmental costs; Tory polemicists accused of 'popery' returned the same accusations to Whig protestants; diplomats in the age of Enlightenment projected Christian stereotypes outwards to make sense of Islam and Hinduism.

The case studies in this volume collectively point to a paradox: stereotyping was so pervasive and foundational to social life, and yet so liable to escalation, that collective engagements with it often ended up perpetuating the very processes of stereotyping. By highlighting such dialectics of stereotyping, and drawing on recent work in social psychology and sociology, the book invites readers to make fresh connections between the early modern past and the present.

Author Biography

Koji Yamamoto is an Associate Professor of Business History at the University of Tokyo