This thesis examines how the intersection of Renaissance humanist and Reformed Christian epistemologies led to the inauguration of a new framework for interpreting human and bodily difference in sixteenth-century England. Taking the notion of ‘monstrosity’ as its starting point, it demonstrates how the doctrine of providence was deployed in a wide range of texts to explain visible differences between and within human groups. I use the term providential emblematisation to describe the process by which these texts transformed humans into legible signs, training the reader to understand their own flawed interiority in relation to the spectacle of human deformity and, consequently, to read external monstrosity in terms of moral failure.

The first chapter of the thesis considers a series of monstrous birth broadsides from 1562, arguing that in relation to their continental predecessors and to the later English tradition, these broadsides had a distinctive focus on the interiority of the reader. Conceiving of human monstrosity as a manifestation of collective but concealed sin, they present individual monstrous births as a means for the reader to grasp the extent of their own internal deformity, thus laying the affective groundwork for sincere repentance.

The second chapter moves from monstrous births to the monstrous peoples (or monstrous ‘races’), taking as its primary focus Stephen Batman’s Doome Warning all Men to the Judgement (1581). In reading collective forms of difference (whether innate or contingent) as admonitory signs, I argue, this text depends upon a form of providential emblematisation which is closely related to race-making.

The third chapter demonstrates how discourses relating to monstrous births and monstrous peoples, along with some of their hermeneutic assumptions, bled into English accounts (often translations of continental texts) of West Africa and the Americas, as well as their inhabitants. I argue that while these texts exist outside of the largely theological parameters of Chapters 1 and 2, they share some of their providential assumptions, conceiving of observable differences between humans (whether corporeal or cultural) as legible evidence of their eschatological status.

In the final chapter of the thesis, I turn to Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Bringing the observations of the previous chapters to bear on this text, I argue that aspects of Spenser’s allegory share in the basic assumptions and tendencies of providential emblematisation. Focussing in particular on how the spectacle of the uncivil and emaciated body becomes the site of knowledge within and beyond the poem, I argue that The Faerie Queene draws on and in turn informs providential discourses concerning human and bodily difference.

In each of these chapters, I remain alert to the actual violence which resulted from the epistemic violence inherent to providential emblematisation. Regimes of objectification, incarceration, transportation, and exhibition were natural consequences of the construction of human bodies as sites of knowledge and legible spectacles. In addition to contributing to period-specific debates about the human, the body, and bodily/human difference (including discourses of race and disability), the thesis engages with broader questions about how Western humanism constituted and contained its Others.