This class engages the criticism, history, and literature related to early modern women, race, and writing in the early modern period, to evoke the title of Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parkers’s groundbreaking collection from 1994. We will cover this and other foundational critical sources, as well as more recent studies that build on them. Our focus will be on gaining a historically grounded and theoretically informed understanding of racial formation with an emphasis on English-language literature from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. This history has its own specificity even as it resonates in our own time. We will strive to hold both these perspectives as we investigate this material individually and together.