Abigail Shinn

Introduction: Conversion Narratives in the Early Modern World

AbstractIn the early modern world the process of describing a conversion experience was often as important, and problematic, as the conversion itself, and the resulting texts illustrate the extent to which conversion and its effects permeated cultural forms. Charting the discursive nature of conversion narratives, which were frequently translated into foreign languages and crossed international boundaries, this introduction discusses the problems inherent in narrating religious change, considers the current historiography, and outlines the premise for this collection.

Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England: Tales of Turning

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.

Father Figures: Paternal Politics in the Conversion Narratives of Thomas Gage and James Wadsworth

This chapter explores how two seventeenth-century converts to Protestantism, Thomas Gage and James Wadsworth, employ father figures as a powerful and multivalent anti-Catholic trope in their conversion narratives. Gage’s The English-American and Wadsworth’s The English Spanish Pilgrime recount how they came to reject the faith of their biological fathers but both men also spent considerable time within Catholic institutions modelled on paternal hierarchies: the Jesuit and Dominican orders. As such, they compose elaborate chains of paternal association which encompass God, the Pope, monarch, magistrate and confessor in order to identify the language of Catholic fatherhood with a perversion of familial roles. I argue that these diverse father figures operate as a way of organising and justifying their conversions to Protestantism.