Conversions

Simon Ditchfield is Professor of Early Modern History and Director of the Centre for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies at the University of York Helen Smith is Professor of Renaissance Literature and Head of the Department of English & Related Literature at the University of York -- .

Notes on contributors
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 eighteenthcentury
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 seventeenthcentury
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 – Chloë 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 -- .