Conversions

Simon Ditchfield is Professor of Early Modern History and Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of YorkHelen Smith is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Head of the Department of English & Related Literature at the University of York

'This excellent collection of essays examines conversion at a time in which religious and theological uncertainties led to the reconfiguration of early modern European national identities. Ranging across regions and cities, from London to Venice, the essays also focus on issues of gender, hybridity and literary conventions. This book is an important addition to the growing body of scholarship on the study of the history of religion in Western Europe.'Nabil Matar, University of Minnesota'This stimulating collection yields new insights into the fluid, unstable and creative relationship between gender and conversion in early modern Europe. Approaching the subject from a range of perspectives, it comprises a series of probing investigations of the nexus between religious subjectivity and gender identity against the backdrop of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations. A model of interdisciplinary dialogue and collaboration, it demonstrates compellingly how language, literature and culture reflected and shaped individual experiences of spiritual change.'Alexandra Walsham, University of Cambridge‘Offers an engrossing gallery of new work that makes a compelling case for embracing methodologically diverse approaches to the interface of gender and religious conversion in early modernity.’Professor Lowell Gallagher, Studies in English Literature

• Notes on contributorsIntroduction – Simon Ditchfield and Helen SmithPart I: Gendering conversion1 To piety or conversion more prone? Gender and conversionin the early modern Mediterranean – Eric Dursteler2 The quiet conversion of a ‘Jewish’ woman in eighteenthcenturySpain – David Graizbord3 ‘A father to the soul and a son to the body’: gender andgeneration in Robert Southwell’s Epistle to his father –Hannah Crawforth4 Gender and reproduction in the Spirituall experiences –Abigail ShinnPart II: Material conversions5 ‘The needle may convert more than the pen’: womenand the work of conversion in early modern England –Claire Canavan and Helen Smith6 Uneven conversions: how did laywomen become nuns in theearly modern world?– Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt7 Domus humilis: the conversion of Venetian conventarchitecture and identity – Saundra Weddle 8 Converting the soundscape of women’s rituals, 1470–1560:purification, candles, and the Inviolata as music forchurching – Jane D. HatterPart III: Travel, race, and conversion9 Narrating women’s Catholic conversions in seventeenthcenturyVietnam – Keith P. Luria 10 ‘I wish to be no other but as he’: Persia, masculinity, andconversion in early seventeenth-century travel writing anddrama – Chloë Houston11 Turning tricks: erotic commodification, cross-culturalconversion, and the bed-trick on the English stage,1580–1630 – Daniel Vitkus12 Whatever happened to Dinah the Black? And other questionsabout gender, race, and the visibility of Protestant saints –Kathleen LynchAfterword – Matthew Dimmock