Conversions Gender and religious change in early modern Europe

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.

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 both masculine and feminine identity.

Simon Ditchfield is Professor of History at the University of York

Introduction - Simon Ditchfield and Helen Smith
Part I: Gendering conversion
1. To piety or conversion more prone? Gender and conversion in the early modern Mediterranean - Eric Dursteler
2. The quiet conversion of a 'Jewish' woman in eighteenth-century Spain - David Graizbord
3. A father to the soul and a son to the body: gender and generation in Robert Southwell's epistle to his father - Hannah Crawforth
4. Gender and reproduction in the Spirituall experiences - Abigail Shinn
Part II: Material conversions
5. 'The needle may convert more than the pen': women and the work of conversion in early modern England - Claire Canavan and Helen Smith
6. Uneven conversions: how did laywomen become nuns in the early modern world?- Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt
7. Domus humilis: the conversion of Venetian convent architecture and identity - Saundra Weddle
8. Converting the soundscape of women's rituals, 1470-1560: purification, candles, and the Inviolata as music for churching - Jane D. Hatter
Part III: Travel, race and conversion
9. Narrating women's Catholic conversions in seventeenth-century Vietnam - Keith P. Luria
10. 'I wish to be no other but as he': Persia, masculinity and conversion in early seventeenth-century travel writing and drama - Chlöe Houston
11. Turning tricks: erotic commodification, cross-cultural conversion, and the bed-trick on the English stage, 1580-1630 - Daniel Vitkus
12.Whatever happened to Dinah the Black? And other questions about gender, race, and the visibility of Protestant saints - Kathleen Lynch
Afterword - Matthew Dimmock
Index