In the book of Genesis (9:20–28), Noah, apparently shamed by his son Ham, laid a curse on Ham's son Canaan, condemning Canaan to servitude. Why, then, do we call it the curse of Ham? The story seems to explain the origins of inferior and superior tribes or nations. At some point in history, the curse came to be identified primarily or exclusively with Ham, Canaan's father, and the unfortunate progeny became Hamites. At least some of Ham's descendents could be, and periodically were, identified with Africa, yet they were sometimes identified with Asia and Europe, too. Historians of American racism, not to mention a good many racists, know this story as a biblical justification for slavery. How it came to imply the enslavement of black Africans in the New World, while characterizing Africans as Hamites and Hamites as hypersexual, is the burden of this book.

Whitford joins a number of recent historians who have shown that the history of the interpretation of the curse of Ham is, in a word, complicated. Paul Freedman, for example, notes its medieval role in conceptualizing peasant servitude in Europe. Benjamin Braude has pointed to a “movement from medieval polyphony to modern monophony” in the story's interpretation, naming the years 1589–1625 as the time when a broad range of alternative medieval ethnic geographies yielded to the familiar racialized concept of African Hamite enslavement (“The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods,” The William and Mary Quarterly 54, no. 1 [January 1997]: 107, 138). Even so, Braude remains impressed by the malleability of this symbol for otherness. It must not be construed, as it has so often been, as “a kind of racism avant la lettre” (142). In fact, the late George Frederickson, the comparative historian of racism, concluded that “the curse [of Ham]” may not have been “securely linked to the polemical defense of slavery until it became an alternative rationale for southerners who resisted scientific racism on fundamentalist religious grounds” (Racism: A Short History [Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002], 176n55 and 135–36). Lest we assume the universality of this racist symbol among Christians or Protestants, Frederickson reminds us that a concept of Hamites played little role in South Africa, where a particular model of Christian national culture was used to justify apartheid. In short, a racist could get along without the story of Noah's curse. The impression we get is of an ongoing early modern to modern flux, within which racist ideas begin to congeal around the figure of Ham, among other things.

Whitford adds further detail to the early modern portion of this intricate tableau. He is, throughout this book, mindful of the diversity of medieval exegetical traditions and mindful that some later Bible readers (for example, the missionary, Morgan Godwyn, at the end of the seventeenth century, and the Jacobite Henry St. John Bolingbrook a generation later) rejected Noah's curse as a justification for slavery. His main purpose, however, is to find when and how Noah's curse was applied to Ham rather than Canaan, and to track the reception of three different traditions about Hamites—that their skin is dark, that their men are macrophallic and hypersexual, and that they are idolatrous and sinful. Ironically, none of this, neither the curse of Ham nor the idea of Hamite hypersexuality and enslavement, is explicit in the Bible. Yet many American Protestants in earlier generations, both in the old denominations and in new sects, have taken the Hamite curse as literally and historically true.

Of these, the oldest idea is Hamite servitude. Patristic writers use the story of Noah's curse to explain slavery, and medieval writers use it to explain serfdom, but neither early Christian nor medieval writers consistently or exclusively place Ham's, or Canaan's, descendants in Africa. Whitford describes the transfer of the curse from Canaan to Ham as a gradually emerging tendency among sixteenth-century Bible scholars. He traces the idea of sexual promiscuity to Johannes Annius of Viterbo, historiographer of the notorious Rodrigo Borgia (Pope Alexander VI). In his forgery of the lost books of Berossus's ancient history of Babylonia, Annius describes Ham as sexually promiscuous and a magician. Leo Africanus reinforced the association of Ham's sons with hypersexuality. Biblical commentaries by authors as influential and as diverse as Martin Luther and the Flemish Jesuit Cornelius a Lapide further confirm and propagate this image of Hamites. The idea that darkness of skin is evidence of God's curse on Africans is traced to the humanist Guillaume Postel and mediated through George Best, Richard Hakluyt, Samuel Bochart, and eventually Edward Leigh's influential Critica sacra (1641). Whitford corrects Winthrop Jordan's claim that the Talmud and Midrash are the origins of this connection between black skin color and the curse of Hamites. Thomas Newton propagates the idea of Hamite enslavement to later American slaveholders.

Taken as a whole, Whitford confirms the general impression of racist ideas congealing within an ongoing flux. By the time we reach Thomas Newton, defender of prophecy in the mid-eighteenth century, it is clear that an abundance of biblical scholarship could be taken to support Newton's arguments, even if Newton, as Whitford believes, not just recklessly but dishonestly fashioned his arguments. In the end, Whitford suggests, the idea of Hamite enslavement does not evolve out of biblical interpretation but arises as an “emergent motif” out of residual elements of exegetical tradition. The reader will notice that others, such as Braude and even Winthrop Jordan, pointed to several of Whitford's key players, for example, Leo Africanus and Richard Hakluyt. The special contribution of this book is its attention to biblical scholarship. In a brilliant fourth chapter, Whitford approaches early modern Bible scholars with refreshing breadth and sophistication, examining not only a wide variety of commentaries but also paratextual apparatuses and lexicography, all of which contributed to the pre-scientific science favored by at least some nineteenth-century racists.