Sun worship in the early modern English colonial imagination

Battell, Sophie 2025. Sun worship in the early modern English colonial imagination. Huntington Library Quarterly 88 , pp. 39-58. 10.1353/hlq.2025.a983127

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Abstract

This article presents a decolonial analysis of the figure of the Indigenous sun worshipper in early modern literature. Drawing on a wide range of ethnographic sources, I show how the sun worshipper emerges as a privileged figure in discussions of Native religious practices. Sun worship was frequently condemned and ridiculed in contemporary discourse, but this analysis of plays such as Shakespeare's The Tempest and Fletcher's The Island Princess offers a more nuanced view. These texts alert us to the violence of colonial encounter and the literary dispossession of Indigenous practitioners of their spiritual connections to the cosmos and the celestial bodies.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Publication
Status:	Published
Schools:	Schools > English, Communication and Philosophy
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press (Penn Press)
ISSN:	0018-7895
Last Modified:	05 May 2026 11:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/186774

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