Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England

Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England PDF Author: Abigail Shinn
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319965778
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

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Book Description
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.

Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England

Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England PDF Author: Abigail Shinn
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319965778
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 255

Get Book

Book Description
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.

Conversions

Conversions PDF Author: Simon Ditchfield
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526107058
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 419

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Book Description
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.

The Evangelical Conversion Narrative

The Evangelical Conversion Narrative PDF Author: D. Bruce Hindmarsh
Publisher: Oxford University Press on Demand
ISBN: 0199245754
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
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.

The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England

The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England PDF Author: Holly Crawford Pickett
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 1512825654
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
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.

The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature

The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature PDF Author: Molly Murray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1139481797
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
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.

The Evangelical Conversion Narrative

The Evangelical Conversion Narrative PDF Author: D. Bruce Hindmarsh
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191529761
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
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.

Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage

Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage PDF Author: Jane Hwang Degenhardt
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 074868655X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book explores the threat of Christian conversion to Islam in twelve early modern English plays. In works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, and others, conversion from Christianity to Islam is represented as both tragic and erotic, as a fate worse t

Religion and life cycles in early modern England

Religion and life cycles in early modern England PDF Author: Caroline Bowden
Publisher: Manchester University Press
ISBN: 1526149222
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Religion and life cycles in early modern England assembles scholars working in the fields of history, English literature and art history to further our understanding of the intersection between religion and the life course in the period c. 1550–1800. Featuring chapters on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish communities, it encourages cross-confessional comparison between life stages and rites of passage that were of religious significance to all faiths in early modern England. The book considers biological processes such as birth and death, aspects of the social life cycle including schooling, coming of age and marriage and understandings of religious transition points such as spiritual awakenings and conversion. Through this inclusive and interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to show that the life cycle was not something fixed or predetermined and that early modern individuals experienced multiple, overlapping life cycles.

Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England

Women, Madness and Sin in Early Modern England PDF Author: Katharine Hodgkin
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 9780754630180
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The narrative presented here is a rare, detailed autobiographical account of one woman's experience of mental disorder in seventeenth-century England. Katharine Hodgkin presents in modern typography an annotated edition of the author's manuscript of this unusual and compelling text. Also included are prefaces to the narrative written by Fitzherbert and others, and letters written shortly after her mental crisis, which develop her account of the episode.

The Turn of the Soul

The Turn of the Soul PDF Author:
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004226370
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
The religious upheavals of the early modern period and the fierce debate they unleashed about true devotion gave conversion an unprecedented urgency. With their rich variety of emotive, aesthetic and rhetoric means of expression, literature and the visual arts proved particularly well-adapted means to address, explore and represent the complex nature of conversion. At the same time, many artists and authors experimented with the notion that the expressive character of their work could cultivate a sensory experience for the viewer that enacted conversion. Indeed, focusing on conversion as one of early modern Europe’s most pressing religious issues, this volume demonstrates that conversion cannot be separated from the creative and spiritual ways in which it was given meaning. Contributors include Mathilde Bernard, John R. Decker, Xander van Eck, Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi, Lise Gosseye, Chloë Houston, Philip Major, Walter Melion, Bart Ramakers, E. Natalie Rothman, Alison Searle, Lieke Stelling, Jayme Yeo, and Federico Zuliani.