Mary Floyd-Wilson is Assistant Professor of English Literature at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has published articles in several journals including English Literary Renaissance, Women's Studies, and South Atlantic Review and is a contributing author to British Identities and English Renaissance Literature (2002). She is currently co-editing a volume of essays entitled Reading the Early Modern Passions: A Cultural History of Emotion, University of Pennsylvania Press (forthcoming).

• List of illustrations; Acknowledgements; Introduction: the marginal English; Part I. Climatic Culture: The Transmissions and Transmutations of Ethnographic Knowlege: 1. The ghost of Hippocrates: geohumoral history in the West; 2. British ethnology; 3. An inside story of race: melancholy and ethnology; Part II. The English Ethnographic Theatre: 4. Tamburlaine and the staging of white barbarity; 5. Temperature and temperance in Ben Jonson's The Masque of Blackness; 6. Othello's jealousy; 7. Cymbeline's angels; Notes; Index.

"Making a contribution of the highest interest and importance to the growing field of early modern race studies, this book expands the scope of current inquiry by approaching from a new angle....Floyd-Wilson's complicated, multi-faceted argument challenges us to keep all of its strands in view. Her emphasis on transition makes her interpretive stance dynamic and far-reaching." Renaissance Quarterly