Craig Koslofsky’s research while affiliated with University of Illinois Chicago and other places

The fierce debate about the reality of spirits and the “Invisible World” which flared up in the 1690’s helped define the early Enlightenment. All sides in this debate—from Spinoza and Balthasar Bekker to John Beaumont and Cotton Mather—refashioned familiar metaphors of light and darkness and connected them with the world beyond Europe in surprising new ways. This article shows how this key controversy of the early Enlightenment was built upon references to darkness, light, and the benighted pagan peoples of the world. As new street lighting and improved domestic lighting nocturnalized daily life in the Netherlands, London, and Paris, the old denizens of the night - ghosts, spirits, and witches—were increasingly relegated to the extra-European world and used to articulate new categories of human difference based on civility, reason, and skin color. These new categories of human difference—new ways of seeing and ordering the world—were essential to the formation of early modern whiteness and the Enlightenment.

Over the last few decades the human skin has emerged as a distinct site of research for humanists, and specifically for historians of race, art, science, and medicine. In the early modern centuries Europeans at home and in the wider world transformed their understanding of skin. They established an overarching, enduring emphasis on the skin's color as the marker of human difference, but the rise of skin color drew from other critical developments in the history of skin in this period: the discovery of the microanatomy of the skin; intense debates among Christians over skin color as a Scripture problem; and the transformation of the ancient doctrine of the humoral body. Recent research shows that in the early modern centuries questions about the skin and skin color arose from collision of new and old epistemologies, economic forces, and signifying practices, generating a wide range of topics to explore, including the use of cosmetics, tattooing and scarification, and whiteness and race. Research on knowing and marking skin in the early modern period raises vital questions about knowledge and ideology, self and other, and identity and exclusion.