Artigo Acesso aberto Revisado por pares

Recent Studies in Religious Conversion

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/692109

ISSN

1475-6757

Autores

Lieke Stelling,

Tópico(s)

American Constitutional Law and Politics

Resumo

Previous article FreeRecent Studies in the English RenaissanceRecent Studies in Religious ConversionLieke StellingLieke StellingUtrecht University Search for more articles by this author Utrecht UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreInitiating StudiesThe study of religious conversion begins in the field of psychology, and focuses on subjective experiences of individuals. As such, it is defined by Protestant traditions of self-scrutiny, self-surrender, and fostering a personal relationship with a Christian God. In his seminal and classic work Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), William James defines conversion as follows: “to be converted, to be regenerated, to receive grace, to experience religion, to gain an assurance, are so many phrases which denote the process, gradual or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, and consciously wrong inferior and unhappy, becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold upon religious realities.” James largely bases himself on the one hundred case studies of evangelical church members that are presented in Edwin Starbuck, The Psychology of Religion (1899). James’s work was followed by G. Stanley Hall, Jesus the Christ in the Light of Psychology (1917) and the first book-length study of the subject: Sante De Sanctis, Religious Conversion: A Bio-Psychological Study (1927). Both Alfred Clair Underwood, in Conversion: Christian and Non-Christian: A Comparative and Psychological Study (1925), and Arthur Darby Nock, in Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo (1933), departed from a strictly Christian understanding of conversion. Nock’s landmark investigation into classical perceptions draws a distinction between conversion as a radical transformation of the soul typically promoted within the prophetic religions of Judaism and Christianity, and a gradual “acceptance of new worships as useful supplements and not as substitutes” that we find in classical forms of paganism.In the course of the twentieth century, new impulses mainly came from sociology: John Lofland and Rodney Stark, “Becoming a World-Saver: A Theory of Conversion to a Deviant Perspective,” American Sociological Review 30 (1965), 862–75 and Eileen Barker, The Making of a Moonie: Choice or Brainwashing? (1984); from anthropology: Robin Horton, “African Conversion,” Africa 41 (1971), 85–108; “On the Rationality of Conversion, Part I,” Africa 45 (1975), 219–35; and “On the Rationality of Conversion, Part II,” Africa 45 (1975), 373–99; and from the study of conversion in religions other than Christianity, notably Islam: Nehemiah Levtzion, Conversion to Islam (1979) and Richard W. Bulliet, Conversion to Islam in the Medieval Period: An Essay in Quantitative History (1979).I. General StudiesIn the introduction to their collected volume The Oxford Handbook of Religious Conversion (2014), pp. 1–47, Lewis R. Rambo and Charles E. Farhadian chart seven defining issues in the current study of religious conversion: 1) emphasis on continuity rather than discontinuity, 2) the active agency of converts, 3) the religious and non-religious complexity of motivations, 4) the understanding of narrative as an integral part of conversion, 5) the importance of the human body and other material aspects, 6) post-conversion life, and 7) the use of conversion analyses in the study of historical events and people and vice versa.Working from the premise of conversion as a metaphor, Karl F. Morrison’s influential Understanding Conversion (1992) argues that eleventh- and twelfth-century artistic representations of conversion were crucial in shaping its understanding in succeeding ages. Analyzing cases of conversion from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries in a global and largely missionary perspective, Kenneth Mills and Anthony Grafton, ed., Conversion: Old Worlds and New (2003) draw attention to the shaping influence of paradigmatic converts and well-known conversion narratives, and show how these were adapted an appropriated by the communities of new worlds. The essays in The Turn of the Soul: Representations of Religious Conversion in Early Modern Art and Literature (2012), ed. Lieke Stelling, Harald Hendrix, and Todd M. Richardson, take conversion first and foremost as a cultural construct, and approach the subject from three questions that informed early modern artistic and literary understandings of conversion: how is conversion authenticated, where is agency located in conversion, and what is the role of imitation in helping to bring about spiritual revelation? In a special issue on conversion, Peter Mazur and Abigail Shinn, “Introduction: Conversion Narratives in the Early Modern World,” JEMH 17 (2013), 427–436, discuss early modern practices of communicating conversions to wider audiences by means of narration, translation, and dissemination. The latest general volume on the subject, Conversions: Gender and Religious Change in Early Modern Europe, ed. Simon Ditchfield and Helen Smith (2017), takes gender as its point of departure, offering chapters on the interplay between constructions and perceptions of gendered identity on the one hand and conversion on the other.II. Studies of Selected TopicsA. Catholic-ProtestantExamining the early days of the English Reformation, Peter Marshall, “Evangelical Conversion in the Reign of Henry VIII,” in The Beginnings of English Protestantism, ed. Peter Marshall and Alec Ryrie (2002), pp. 14–37 (rpt. in his Religious Identities in Henry VIII’s England (2006), pp. 19–42), proposes the term “evangelical conversion” to describe the experiences of religious regeneration that involved the rejection of Catholicism and embrace of persuasions that would only later be categorized as Protestant. Hardly ever documented in autobiographical accounts, conversion in this period, Marshall argues, was typically understood as a “profound yearning for personal religious renewal” and as a desire to explain this experience in theological terms. In his comprehensive study of the political significances conversion took on in a time of unprecedented confessional polemic, Michael Questier, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (1996), reminds us of the remarkable pervasiveness of “flux in religion,” and helps establish the importance of conversion as a tool to explore the ambiguities and instabilities of religious allegiance. Alec Ryrie, in his section on conversion in “The Protestant Life,” in Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013), pp. 407–68, examines conversion as part of the everyday lives of Protestants, and devotes particular attention to the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the Protestant ideals of conversion by preaching and the process of conversion following a clear scheme, and, on the other, the “messier” and less predictable practice.Questier’s chapter “‘Like Locusts all over the World’: Conversion, Indoctrination, and the Society of Jesuits in Late Elizabethan and Jacobean England,” in The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits, ed. T. McCoog (1996), pp. 346–70, analyzes the proselytizing strategies and techniques of English Jesuits to reveal the multifaceted and surprisingly intricate relationship between English Catholicism and the Church of England. In his effort to establish the importance of “Catholic writing and experience” to early modern English culture, Arthur F. Marotti, “Performing Conversion,” in his Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (2005), pp. 95–130, surveys the conversions of prominent new Catholics, including William Alabaster, Francis Walsingham (“namesake and kinsman of Queen Elizabeth’s Catholic-hating secretary of state”), and Sir Toby Matthew, and the political discourse surrounding their changes of faith. In “Dumb Preachers: Catholicism and the Culture of Print,” in her Catholic Reformation in Protestant Britain (2014), pp. 235–83, Alexandra Walsham discusses the importance of Catholic print in making converts. Noting that women were not only seen as more likely converts, notably to Catholicism, than men, but also as capable of converting others, Claire Canavan and Helen Smith, “‘The Needle May Convert More than the pen’: Women and the Work of Conversion in Early Modern England,” in Ditchfield and Smith (I), pp. 105–26, argue that women’s devotional needlework, often regarded as an act of domestic passivity, was in fact an instrument of pious agency.Analyzing the cases of William Alabaster, Marc Antonio De Dominis, and William Chillingworth, Holly Crawford Pickett, “Motion Rhetoric in Serial Conversion Narratives: Religion and Change in Early Modern England,” in Redrawing the Map of Early Modern English Catholicism, ed. Lowell Gallagher (2012), pp. 84–112, draws our attention to the difficult position of serial converts. Having to defend themselves against accusations of inconsistency and opportunism, they used language of natural philosophy, motion, and discovery to explain their decisions. In so doing, Pickett argues, they made attempts “to transcend ecclesiastical boundaries” that are reminiscent of medieval traditions, as well as of Enlightenment interests in natural science, religious toleration, and ecumenism. See also III, A Alabaster; B Bale; C Carpenter; F Donne; I Jonson; L Middleton; M Perne; N Shakespeare 3. Other Plays; O Southwell; P Spira; T Woodes.B. Muslim-ChristianThe most prolific author on Anglo-Ottoman relationships, Nabil Matar, “The Renegade in English Seventeenth-Century Imagination,” SEL 33 (1993), 489–505, and Islam in Britain 1558–1685 (1998), was the first to examine the renegade as a stock character and product of English anxieties over perceived alarming numbers of British Christians who converted to Islam. Maintaining that the stage renegade embodied the “internal evil that threatened Christendom” and served as a disturbing reminder of the worldly appeal the expansionary Ottoman empire held for many Englishmen, Matar notes that contrary to their historical counterparts, who happily lived ever after, fictional renegades met with divine retribution to “inject fear about the consequences of apostasy,” or repented. Lois Potter, “Pirates and ‘Turning Turk’ in Renaissance Drama,” in Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time, ed. Jean-Pierre Maquerlot and Michèle Willems (1996), pp.124–40, discusses dramatic references to piracy and apostasy to Islam against the backdrop of the English piracy that flourished under James I’s reign. Barbara Fuchs, “Faithless Empires: Pirates, Renegadoes, and the English Nation,” ELH 67 (2000), 45–69, rpt. in her Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam and European Identities (2001), pp. 118–38, too, surveys the role and reputation of renegade pirates in early seventeenth-century England. Dennis Britton, “Muslim Conversion and Circumcision as Theater,” in Religion and Drama in Early Modern England: The Performance of Religion on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Jane Hwang Degenhardt and Elizabeth Williamson (2011), pp. 71–86, analyzes the ways in which stage renegades use tricks, props, and costumes to counterfeit circumcision and hide their true religious convictions—an unsettling reminder of the idea that the religious identities of real-life converts may be equally prone to dissimulation. Considering the stage renegade in the light of the Civil War, Matthew Birchwood, “Turning to the Turk: Collaboration and Conversion in William Davenant’s The Siege of Rhodes,” in Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings, ed. Goran Stanivukovic (2007), pp. 207–226, and reprinted in his Staging Islam in England: Drama and Culture, 1640–1685 (2007), pp. 96–128, claims that during the Protectorate, the political relevance of the character of the renegade increased and became more defined, as Oliver Cromwell was compared to a Turkish tyrant and his supporters to renegades having betrayed the monarchy. In the Siege of Rhodes, Davenant complicates this image by having the Turkish despot transform into the epitome of Christian kingship.Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (2003) argues for a generic approach to Christian-Islamic conversion plays, that is, by documenting patterns in conversion plots and their relation to the “powerful conjunction of sexual, commercial, political, and religious anxieties in early modern English culture.” Vitkus is particularly perceptive on the metaphoric significance of Christian-Islamic stage conversion, especially the trope of “turning” and its sexual and political connotations. A Biblical approach to the semantics of “turning turk” comes from Patricia Parker, “Preposterous Conversions: Turning Turk, and Its ‘Pauline’ Rerighting,” JEMCS 2 (2002), 1–34, who notices that the idea of the preposterous “as both the ‘unnatural’ and the ‘reversed’ or ‘turned,’” having its roots in Paul’s Galatians and Romans 1, was used in English polemical discourse against Muslims in general and specifically against conversion to Islam. Jonathan Burton, Claire Norton, Bernadette Andrea, and Jane Hwang Degenhardt, are, like Vitkus, interested in the wider economic, political, racial and gender-related significance of dramatic conversions to and from Islam. Burton, “English Anxiety and the Muslim Power of Conversion: Five Perspectives on ‘Turning Turk’ in Early Modern Texts,” JEMCS 2 (2002), 35–67, and Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624 (2005) and Claire Norton, “Lust, Greed, Torture, and Identity: Narrations of Conversion and the Creation of the Early Modern Renegade,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 29 (2009), 259–68 complicate Vitkus’s analysis by introducing the ignored viewpoints of early modern Muslims, and Andrea, Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature (2007), that of women. Degenhardt, Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage (2010) pays special attention to proto-racial conceptions of Islamic identity and to the ways in which (the threat of) conversion to Islam was construed in terms of erotic seduction. She also shows how these presentations were inextricably linked to national debates about Protestant reform.Jacqueline Pearson, “‘One Lot in Sodom’: Masculinity and the Gendered Body in Early Modern Narratives of Converted Turks,” Literature & Theology 21 (2007), 29–48, shows how Protestant accounts of the rare baptisms of Turks in England make extensive use of gender stereotypes to portray the Turkish enemy as effeminate and grotesque, and, by implication, English Protestant identity as its self-controlled and virile antipode. See also III, D Daborne; E Dekker and Massinger; K Massinger; N Shakespeare 2. Othello.C. Jewish-ChristianIn his influential Shakespeare and the Jews (1996), James Shapiro traces how Elizabethan conceptions of national, racial, and political identity raised questions over the very possibility of the conversion of Jews. Focusing on confessional changes of the Reformation in relation to early modern conceptions of Jews, Jeffrey Shoulson, Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England (2013) claims that the Jew functioned as an ideal figure onto which the “alarming implications” of the “confessional transitions and shifts” of the Reformation could be projected. While his potential conversion was perceived to be of great Scriptural significance, it was the possibility of dissimulation and deceit that made him an embodiment of these fears.In “The Calling of the Jews,” in his Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England 1603–1655 (1982), pp. 89–126, David S. Katz examines the importance English millenarians attached to the idea that the mass conversion of the Jews to Christianity would not only herald the Second Coming, but also confirm England as its chosen facilitator. He notes that the idea “provided a receptive climate for discussion,” but did not change the minds of most of the English, who felt attracted more to its theoretical and theological implications than to the practice of readmitting contemporary Jews to England. Also writing about seventeenth-century Millenarianism, Guibbory Achsah, “Conversation, Conversion, Messianic Redemption: Margaret Fell, Menasseh ben Israel, and the Jews,” in Literary Circles and Cultural Communities in Renaissance England, ed. Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (2000), pp. 210–34, considers how the Quaker leader Margaret Fell, by means of the printed pamphlet, sought to create an international spiritual community of Quakers and Jews in an attempt to bring Jews to the Quaker fold.Martin Mulsow and Richard H. Popkin’s collection, Secret Conversions to Judaism in Early Modern Europe (2004), publishes relevant essays on a direction of conversion that was often considered improbable. Their introduction (pp. 1–17) presents six contextual frameworks in which—often secret—conversions from Christianity to Judaism occurred, ranging from the anti-Trinitarianism that some Protestants shared with Jews, and Christian philosemitism, to the desire of forcibly Christianized Jews to return to their original faith. With his essay “Can one be a True Christian and a Faithful Follower of the Law of Moses? The Answer of John Drury” (pp. 33–50), Richard H. Popkin presents the case of this Scottish Calvinist minister and intellectual, whose attempt to unite Christian denominations “might well have extended to bringing Jews into Christianity and Christians into Judaism.” See also III, J Marlowe; N Shakespeare 1. The Merchant of Venice; S Tremellius.D. Pagan-ChristianLinda Gregerson, “The Commonwealth of the Word: New England, Old England, and the Praying Indians,” in Empires of God: Religious Encounters in the Early Modern Atlantic, ed. Linda Gregerson and Susan Juster (2011), pp. 70–83, focuses on missionary pamphlets, produced during the Commonwealth period, that were aimed at creating a community of Puritan fellow believers in America. She pays special attention to the transcribed and perceived subversive questions of the “praying Indians,” about the missionary ideas of their teachers. Dennis Austin Britton, Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance (2014) asserts that the Christianizations of non-white infidels as radical transformations of identity is an important topos of romance, which typically presents them as miracles. The reason why this possibility was questioned or even dismissed in works of writers such as Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare is because they wrote in a Church of England tradition, which not only rejected the miraculous powers of baptism, but in so doing also “transformed [Ethiopians, Moors, Turks, and Jews] into figures of sin, as well as Christians, into racialized subjects.” See also II, E Stelling; III, E Dekker and Massinger; G Fletcher; Q Shirley.E. Multiple ReligionsDaniel Vitkus, “Poisoned Figs, or ‘The Traveler’s Religion’: Travel, Trade, and Conversion in Early Modern English Culture,” in Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings, ed. Goran V. Stanivukovic (2007), pp. 41–57, shows that early modern drama drew analogies between English travel and commercial exchange on the one hand, and conversion to Catholicism and Islam on the other, in attempts to warn against the corruptive influence of foreign religion and culture. This idea is further explored in his “Turning Tricks: Erotic Commodification, Cross-Cultural Conversion, and the Bed-Trick on the English Stage, 1580–1630,” in Ditchfield and Smith (I), pp. 236–57, as part of three popular and often converging forms of stage trickery: commercial, religious, and erotic deception,. Lieke Stelling, “‘Thy Very Essence is Mutability’: Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama, 1558–1642,” in Stelling, Hendrix, and Richardson (I), pp. 59–83, argues that playwrights invested stage conversions from Judaism, Islam, and Paganism to Christianity with death and marriage as forms of irreversibility to rescue Christian identity from the destabilizing effect of conversion on the sense of a stable national identity. Matthew Dimmock, “Converting and not Converting Strangers in Early Modern London,” JEMH 17 (2013), 457–78, considers the relatively random and unrehearsed nature of baptismal services for non-Christian “strangers”—‘Indians,’ Jews, ‘Blackmores,’ and ‘Turks’—and notices that unlike the other groups, Jews and Muslims were “requited to speak” because they were perceived as members of religions that posed a serious threat to English Protestantism. In “Whatever Happened to Dinah the Black? And Other Questions about Gender, Race and the Visibility of Protestant Saints,” in Ditchfield and Smith (I), pp. 258–80, Kathleen Lynch explores ways in which the lives and identities of “trophy converts,” such as afro-Caribbean women, were represented to fit the agendas of the gathered churches in Civil War English society. See also II, D Britton.F. Spiritual ExperienceJudith Pollmann, “A Different Road to God: The Protestant Experience of Conversion in the Sixteenth Century,” in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter van der Veer (1996), pp. 47–64, draws attention to the fact that sixteenth-century Protestants, as opposed to their seventeenth-century counterparts, were remarkably silent on their conversion experiences, arguing that they perceived their conversions not in paradigmatic Pauline or Augustinian terms, but as a less radically transformative learning experience. As is suggested by Kathleen Lynch, “Any Politic Body: The Polemics of Conversion in the 1620s,” in her Protestant Autobiography in the Seventeenth-Century Anglophone World (2012), pp. 31–72, in England this changed after the Confessions was published for the first time in an English translation by Tobie Matthew. Lynch notices that the Confessions was appropriated by Catholics and Protestant alike to strengthen their doctrinal positions. Tobie Matthew and John Donne, friends and converts in opposite directions, receive special attention for autobiographically responding to the Confessions in spiritual ways that went beyond doctrinal polemics. In her “Conversion Narratives in Old and New England,” in The Oxford Handbook of Literature and the English Revolution, ed. Laura Lunger Knoppers (2012), pp. 425–41, Lynch considers the central role of conversion narratives, with St Paul and Augustine as classical but not wholly unproblematic models, in authenticating spiritual experience and building Independent and Congregational Churches in seventeenth-century England and America.Helen Wilcox, “‘Return unto Me!’ Literature and Conversion in Early Modern England,” in Paradigms, Poetics and Politics of Conversion, ed. Jan M. Bremmer, Wout J. van Bekkum, and Arie L. Molendijk (2006), pp. 85–106, reflects upon the complex and gradual processes of Protestant spiritual conversion as a “creative stimulus” in a large variety of early modern English literary works. In her The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (2009), Molly Murray discusses the way in which the convert-poets William Alabaster, John Donne, Richard Crashaw, and John Dryden expressed their religious experience in verse, a genre that lends itself particularly well to addressing the paradoxes and quandaries raised by conversion. Indeed, Murray pays special attention to the ways in which the poets embraced its continuously unsettling effects on their self-identities. Helen Smith, “Metaphor, Cure, and Conversion in Early Modern England,” RQ 67 (2014), 473–502, reminds us of the strikingly intimate connection between the language of physical illness and bodily cure on the one hand, and spiritual suffering and conversion on the other, arguing that the likeness between these categories enabled early moderns to express and produce religious experience in a bodily and a spiritual sense.Bruce D. Hindmarsh, “Early Modern Origins,” in his The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (2005), pp. 33–60, argues that the Puritan theology of introspection and self-scrutiny in the late sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth created the conditions that would give rise to the spate of Evangelical conversion narratives in the mid-eighteenth century. One collection of (anonymous) radical Protestant conversion stories mentioned by Hindmarsh, The Spirituall Experiences of Sundry Beleevers (1653), is scrutinized by Abigail Shinn, “Gender and Reproduction in the Spiritual Experiences,” in Ditchfield and Smith (I), pp. 81–101, who observes that most of the “sundry beleevers” are women, the many “female gender signifiers” and references to motherhood rendering it a “reproductive text,” or work “designed to draw the reader into a fertile, and ever-expanding textual congregation.”Alizon Brunning, “‘Thou art damned for alt’ring thy religion’: The Double Coding of Conversion in City Comedy,” Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy, ed. Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein (2004), pp. 154–62, recognizes the structure of the Protestant conversion narrative in Eastward Ho, The Honest Whore Part I, and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, which invites the audience to consider critically whether the repenting characters are being sincere in their expressions of remorse. Alan Rudrum, “God’s Second Book and the Regenerate Mind: Some Early Modern Conversion Narratives,” in Renaissance Ecology: Imagining Eden in Milton’s England, ed. Ken Hiltner (2008), 201–16, discusses the spiritual conversion narratives of Jacob Boehme, George Fox, and Henry Vaughan, and argues that they are marked by new and heightened understandings of the natural world. Philip Major, “‘Most Necessarily to be Knowne’: The Conversion Narratives of Samuel Smith,” in Stelling, Hendrix, and Richardson (I), pp. 153–75, demonstrates how the Church of England minister Samuel Smith presented biblical models of conversion in a way that allowed both for the Protestant understanding of conversion as the work of God alone and for the desire of preachers to offer biblical models of conversion that could be followed by parishioners as well as fellow clergymen. Naomi McAreavey, “Reading Conversion Narratives as Literature of Trauma: Radical Religion, the Wars of the Three Kingdoms and the Cromwellian Re-Conquest of Ireland,” in Region, Religion and English Renaissance Literature, ed. David Coleman (2013), 153–170, employs a framework of trauma theory in discussing mid-seventeenth-century conversion narratives of members of Independent congregations as tools for expressing and responding to traumatic experiences suffered during the Wars of the Three Kingdoms. See also III, F Donne; H Herbert; P Spira; R Trapnel; T Woodes.III. Studies of Individual Authors and ConvertsA. William AlabasterChallenging the common assumption that the conversion narrative is an exclusively Protestant genre, Molly Murray, “‘Now I am a Catholique’: William Alabaster and the Early Modern Catholic Conversion Narrative,” in Catholic Culture in Early Modern England, ed. Ronald Corthell, Frances E. Dolan, and Arthur F. Marotti (2008), pp. 189–215, discusses William Alabaster’s “highly stylized” autobiographical account of his conversion to Catholicism, with special emphasis on Alabaster’s literary interest in “formally determined aspects of religious change.” A hypertext critical edition of Alabaster’s conversion narrative is offered by Dana F. Sutton, “William Alabaster, Alabaster’s Conversion (1599): A Hypertext Critical Edition,” ed. and introd. Dana F. Sutton (2012) http://www.philological.bham.ac.uk/alabconv/. See also II, A Marotti, Pickett; F Murray.B. John BaleOliver Wort, John Bale and Religious Conversion in Reformation England (2013) addresses different aspects of John Bale’s rejection of his life as a Carmelite friar and his embrace of “a reformed faith.” Crucial to its approach are the notion of conversion as a drawn out process rather than a specific moment, and questions of the “narrative construction” of Bale’s religious transformation, including those of differing conversion accounts and of authentication. Wort concludes that Bale’s pre-conversion Catholic beliefs and identity continued to play a shaping role in his life as an evangelical reformer.C. Richard CarpenterAlison Shell, “Multiple Conversion and the Menippean Self: The Case of Richard Carpenter,” in Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts, ed. Arthur Marotti (1999), pp. 154–97, discusses the way in which this English Protestant, who had converted to Catholicism and recanted, used Menippean satire to portray his life of travel and his enemies’ religious changeability.D. Robert DaborneMatthew Dimmock, “Materialising Islam on the Early Modern English Stage,” in Early Modern Encounters with the Islamic East: Performing Cultures, ed. Sabine Schülting, Sabine Lucia Müller, and Ralf Hertel (2012), pp. 115–32 explores the material aspects of the staging of Islam and conversion to Islam in A Christian Turn’d Turke.E. Thomas Dekker and Philip MassingerJane Hwang Degenhardt, “Catholic Martyrdom in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr and the Early Modern Threat of ‘Turning Turk,’” ELH 73 (2006), 83–117, describes the way in which the tragedy repurposes notions of Catholic Martyrdom as models for resisting the threat of forced conversion to Islam. Holly Crawford Pickett, “Dramatic Nostalgia and Spectacular Conversion in Dekker and Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr,” SEL 49 (2009), 437–62, shows how the

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