Abstract

Terence Keel's Divine Variations: How Christian Thought Became Racial Science attributes the origins of “racial science” to Christian intellectual history. This is a bold and original argument, but it is not without deep difficulties, particularly in the early sections of the book. The concept of “race” is not sufficiently historicized and the treatment of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach needs to be more firmly grounded in the world of eighteenth‐century natural history.