KIMBERLY ANN COLES is an Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland, and the author of Religion, Reform, and Women’s Writing in Early Modern England (Cambridge UP, 2008). Her book project, Bad Humour: Race, Religion, and the Constitution of Wrong Belief in Early Modern England, contends with the medical and philosophical context that makes moral constitution (itself the framework within which religious ideology is understood) a physiological, heritable feature of the blood.  "Moral Constitution: Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam and the Color of Blood," considers the moral encoding of raced subjects. If The Tragedy of Mariam is “about” anything, it is about rank—and the privileges of moral superiority that rank inherently bestows. The embodiment of moral differences in the play, color-coded in black and white, are grounded in prevailing medical theory as it attaches to rank. The play serves, then, as both a reiteration of early modern racial logic and a site of its manufacture.

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