[PDF] Conversion Narratives In Early Modern England eBook

Author : Abigail Shinn
Publisher : Springer
Page : 262 pages
File Size : 28,13 MB
Release : 2018-10-04
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 3319965778

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This book is a study of English conversion narratives between 1580 and 1660. Focusing on the formal, stylistic properties of these texts, it argues that there is a direct correspondence between the spiritual and rhetorical turn. Furthermore, by focusing on a comparatively early period in the history of the conversion narrative the book charts for the first time writers’ experimentation and engagement with rhetorical theory before the genre’s relative stabilization in the 1650s. A cross confessional study analyzing work by both Protestant and Catholic writers, this book explores conversion’s relationship with reading; the links between conversion, eloquence, translation and trope; the conflation of spiritual movement with literal travel; and the use of the body as a site for spiritual knowledge and proof.

Author : D. Bruce Hindmarsh
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 17,49 MB
Release : 2007
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0199236712

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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of ordinary women and men experienced evangelical conversion and turned to a certain form of spiritual autobiography to make sense of their lives. This book traces the rise and progress of conversion narrative as a unique form of spiritual autobiography in early modern England. After outlining the emergence of the genre in the seventeenth century and the revival of the form in the journals of the leaders of the Evangelical Revival, the central chapters of the book examine extensive archival sources to show the subtly different forms of narrative identity that appeared among Wesleyan Methodists, Moravians, Anglicans, Baptists, and others. Attentive to the unique voices of pastors and laypeople, women and men, Western and non-Western peoples, the book establishes the cultural conditions under which the genre proliferated.

Author : Simon Ditchfield
Publisher : Manchester University Press
Page : 419 pages
File Size : 40,6 MB
Release : 2017-01-06
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1526107058

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Conversions is the first collection to explicitly address the intersections between sexed identity and religious change in the two centuries following the Reformation. Chapters deal with topics as diverse as convent architecture and missionary enterprise, the replicability of print and the representation of race. Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history and art history, Conversions offers new insights into the varied experiences of, and responses to, conversion across and beyond Europe. A lively Afterword by Professor Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex) drives home the contemporary urgency of these themes and the lasting legacies of the Reformations.

Author : D. Bruce Hindmarsh
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 399 pages
File Size : 18,61 MB
Release : 2005-03-17
Category : History
ISBN : 0199245754

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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of ordinary women and men experienced evangelical conversion and turned to a certain form of spiritual autobiography to make sense of their lives. This book traces the rise and progress of 'conversion narrative' in England during this period and establishes some of the cultural conditions that allowed the genre to proliferate.

Author : Lieke Stelling
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 231 pages
File Size : 34,5 MB
Release : 2019-01-03
Category : Drama
ISBN : 1108477038

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A cross-religious exploration of conversion on the early modern English stage offering fresh readings of canonical and lesser-known plays.

Author : Jeffrey S. Shoulson
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 30,64 MB
Release : 2013-03-21
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0812208196

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The fraught history of England's Long Reformation is a convoluted if familiar story: in the space of twenty-five years, England changed religious identity three times. In 1534 England broke from the papacy with the Act of Supremacy that made Henry VIII head of the church; nineteen years later the act was overturned by his daughter Mary, only to be reinstated at the ascension of her half-sister Elizabeth. Buffeted by political and confessional cross-currents, the English discovered that conversion was by no means a finite, discrete process. In Fictions of Conversion, Jeffrey S. Shoulson argues that the vagaries of religious conversion were more readily negotiated when they were projected onto an alien identity—one of which the potential for transformation offered both promise and peril but which could be kept distinct from the emerging identity of Englishness: the Jew. Early modern Englishmen and -women would have recognized an uncannily familiar religious chameleon in the figure of the Jewish converso, whose economic, social, and political circumstances required religious conversion, conformity, or counterfeiting. Shoulson explores this distinctly English interest in the Jews who had been exiled from their midst nearly three hundred years earlier, contending that while Jews held out the tantalizing possibility of redemption through conversion, the trajectory of falling in and out of divine favor could be seen to anticipate the more recent trajectory of England's uncertain path of reformation. In translations such as the King James Bible and Chapman's Homer, dramas by Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson, and poetry by Donne, Vaughan, and Milton, conversion appears as a cypher for and catalyst of other transformations—translation, alchemy, and the suspect religious enthusiasm of the convert—that preoccupy early modern English cultures of change.

Author : Michael C. Questier
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 270 pages
File Size : 35,11 MB
Release : 1996-07-13
Category : History
ISBN : 9780521442145

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A study of conversion and its implications during the English Reformation.

Author : Lieke Stelling
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 413 pages
File Size : 24,94 MB
Release : 2012-01-05
Category : History
ISBN : 9004218564

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Focusing on conversion as one of early modern Europe’s most pressing issues, the present book offers a comprehensive reading of artistic and literary ways in which spiritual transformations and exchanges of religious identities were given meaning.

Author : Molly Murray
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 20,92 MB
Release : 2009-10-15
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1139481797

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Christians in post-Reformation England inhabited a culture of conversion. Required to choose among rival forms of worship, many would cross - and often recross - the boundary between Protestantism and Catholicism. This study considers the poetry written by such converts, from the reign of Elizabeth I to that of James II, concentrating on four figures: John Donne, William Alabaster, Richard Crashaw, and John Dryden. Murray offers a context for each poet's conversion within the era's polemical and controversial literature. She also elaborates on the formal features of the poems themselves, demonstrating how the language of poetry could express both spiritual and ecclesiastical change with particular vividness and power. Proposing conversion as a catalyst for some of the most innovative devotional poetry of the period, both canonical and uncanonical, this study will be of interest to all specialists in early modern English literature.

Author : Holly Crawford Pickett
Publisher : University of Pennsylvania Press
Page : 265 pages
File Size : 18,39 MB
Release : 2024-03-12
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1512825654

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In The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England, Holly Crawford Pickett reconceptualizes early modern religious identity by exploring the astonishing stories of serial converts: historical figures such as William Alabaster, Kenelm Digby, William Chillingworth, and Marc Antonio De Dominis, along with fictional ones, who changed their religious affiliations between Catholicism and Protestantism multiple times. Pickett argues that serial converts both reveal and helped revise early modern understandings of the self. Through investigation of the techniques that serial converts used to stage and justify their conversions, Pickett demonstrates the performative nature of the act of conversion itself, offering a counternarrative to the paradigm of sincere, private conversion that was on the rise in the tumultuous years following the Reformation. Drawing from archival investigation into the lives and works of serial converts and performance studies theory, this book shows how the genres and conventions associated with conversion shaped not only forms of communication but also the very experience of conversion. By juxtaposing plays about serial conversion—by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare—with spiritual autobiographies, Pickett highlights the shared task of convert and playwright: performing conversion for an audience. Serial converts served as uncomfortable reminders to their contemporaries that religious identity is always unverifiable. The first study to explore serial conversion as a discrete phenomenon in this era, The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England challenges confessional divisions within much early modern historiography by analyzing the surprising convergence of Protestant and Catholic in the figure of the serial convert. It also reveals a neglected strain of religious discourse in early modern England that valued mutability and flexibility even in the midst of hardening and increasingly narrow understandings of conversion.