Conversions : gender and religious change in early modern Europe / edited by Simon Ditchfield and Helen Smith.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Ditchfield, Simon, editor.

Smith, Helen, 1977- editor.

Series:

Manchester Shakespeare collection

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Conversion--History.

Conversion.

Sex role--Religious aspects.

Sex role.

Europe--Religion--16th century.

Europe.

Europe--Religion--17th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xv, 336 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2017.

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

Under the combined effects of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations within and pressure from the Ottoman Empire without, early modern Europe became a site in which an unprecedented number of people were confronted by new beliefs, and collective and individual religious identities were broken down and reconfigured. Conversions: gender and religious change in early modern Europe is the first collection to explicitly address the intersections between sexed identity and religious change in the two centuries following the Reformation. The varied and wide-ranging chapters in this collection bring the Renaissance 'turn of the soul' into productive conversation with the three most influential 'turns' of recent literary, historical, and art historical study: the 'turn to religion', the 'material turn', and the 'gender turn'. Contributors consider masculine as well as feminine identity, and consider the impact of travel, printing, and the built environment alongside questions of genre, race and economics. Of interest to scholars of early modern history, literature, and architectural history, this collection will appeal to anyone interested in the vexed history of religious change, and the transformations of gendered selfhood. Bringing together leading scholars from across the disciplines of literary study, history and art history, Conversions: gender and religious change offers novel 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.

Contents:

To piety or conversion more prone? Gender and conversion in the early modern Mediterranean / Eric Dursteler

The quiet conversion of a "Jewish" woman in eighteenth-century Spain / David Graizbord

"A father to the soul and a son to the body": gender and generation in Robert Southwell's Epistle to his father / Hannah Crawforth

Gender and reproduction in the Spirituall experiences / Abigail Shinn

"The needle may convert more than the pen": women and the work of conversion in early modern England / Claire Canavan and Helen Smith

Uneven conversions: how did laywomen become nuns in the early modern world? / Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt

Domus humilis: the conversion of Venetian convent architecture and identity / Saundra Weddle

Converting the soundscape of women's rituals, 1470-1560: purification, candles, and the Inviolata as music for churching / Jane D. Hatter

Narrating women's Catholic conversions in seventeenth-century Vietnam / Keith P. Luria

"I wish to be no other but as he": Persia, masculinity, and conversion in early seventeenth-century travel writing and drama / Chloë Houston

Turning tricks: erotic commodification, cross-cultural conversion, and the bed-trick on the English stage, 1580-1630 / Daniel Vitkus

Whatever happened to Dinah the Black? And other questions about gender, race, and the visibility of Protestant saints / Kathleen Lynch

Afterword / Matthew Dimmock.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 24 Mar 2026).

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781526107053

1526107058

9781526121059

1526121050

9781526107046

152610704X

OCLC:

978898453