Unsavoury conversions

Sir Thomas Browne was an English author and physician, whose interests ranged from the bronze age practice of urn burial to astrology, biblical hermeneutics, and the mystical significance of the quincunx (the arrangement of five units in a pattern like the dots on the five-spot side of a dice). His 1646 Pseudodoxica epidemica, or, Enquiries into Very many Received Tenets, and commonly Presumed Truths constituted a vast encyclopedia of misconceptions, false assumptions, and untruths, which he aimed to put to rest once and for all.

 

Carnivalesque #84

The King of Carnivalesque, Mikhail Bakhtin, is famous for celebrating François Rabelais’ joyfully satirical world-turned-upside down, in which grotesque bodies eat, belch and excrete their way across a fantasy of early modern Europe. Despite (because of?) his own time spent in Holy Orders, Rabelais was no fan of organised religion: his monks are venal, greedy, and incontinent — and frequently destined for an unpleasant end!

For our conversion Carnivalesque, we’ve tried to bring in both Carnival and Lent, celebrating some great posts which handle religious literature and history, but also remembering that ‘conversion’ itself can embrace ‘Transposition, inversion’ (OED n.4), and extending our gaze to moments of transformation, hybridity and change.

 

Conversion Narratives at 10k

Cross-posted on the Conversion Narratives project website.

Last Friday, we welcomed (virtually) our ten thousandth visitor to this blog — a statistic we’re pretty pleased with given the shall-we-say ‘specialist’ nature of this site (now there’s a phrase designed to attract google hits!). We are delighted to be well on our way to our target of 20000 hits by the formal end of the project in September 2013. Most exciting, however, is the global range of our readership.

 

Conversion Narratives to host Carnivalesque

On the 28/29^th April the Conversion Narratives blog will be hosting Carnivalesque, the blog carnival for pre-modern history. A blog carnival is a blog-post that contains links to posts on other blogs – acting as a great meeting place for different bloggers with a shared theme.

For our conversion carnival the idea is that bloggers interested in early modern conversion or other religious themes come together. Blogs are nominated – you can of course nominate yourself  - via the carnivalesque site:

www.carnivalesque.org

If you’re an early modern blogger or if you have a favourite blog let us know – let the conversion carnival begin!

 

Northern convert artists in Rome

Peter Paul Rubens, St. Gregory the Great surrounded by male and female saints adoring the miraculous image of the Virgin and child, the so-called Madonna della Vallicella, 1606, oil on canvas. Grenoble, Musée de Grenoble, France.

 

In 1606 the Flemish artist Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640), who had come to Rome from Antwerp, won perhaps the most important commission of his young career. This was the high altarpiece painting for the Chiesa Nuova, the Roman mother church of the Oratorians, a Catholic reform religious order founded in the papal city during the sixteenth century. That same year, German engraver Mattheus Greuter (c. 1564/1566 – 1638), come to Rome from Strassburg, executed two engravings for the Roman Oratorian congregation that echoed the composition of Rubens’ altarpiece.

 

Conversion and Cake

The symbolic importance of food and food practices (or ‘foodways’ in academic speak) to religious culture is readily apparent at this time of year. During Lent it is traditional for Christians to fast, marking the beginning of the Lenten period by using up fat, eggs and flour in pancakes on Shrove Tuesday. At Easter we consume chocolate eggs  - a pagan fertility symbol hijacked by Cadburys – and hot cross buns – a reminder of the crucifixion. A recent lecture by Eric Dursteler (Brigham Young University) at the University of York on food and conversion in early modern Spain brought to the project’s attention the complex role played by foodways in cultures where large numbers of people converted – willingly or otherwise – from one faith to another.

 

Review: Antoinina Bevan Zlatar, Reformation Fictions: Polemical Protestant Dialogues in Elizabethan England, (Oxford: Oxford University Press: 2011).

This book analyzes a range of Elizabethan Protestant dialogues with an eye towards providing a rehabilitative rhetorical and historicist reading of these often misunderstood and neglected texts.  It differs from previous studies of the genre by focusing specifically on a limited corpus, rather than attempting a more broad (and thus vague) collective understanding of varied subgenres.  In particular, Antoinina Bevan Zlatar argues for an increased emphasis to be placed on the strong fictive elements of these dialogues. 

 

A devil with a double voice: conversion and possession in early modern Provence

Along with the other members of the Conversion Narratives team, I’m currently in Washington, DC, preparing for the Renaissance Society of America Conference: a three-day event with a dizzying array of papers and panels. We’re lucky enough to be working in the wonderful Folger Shakespeare Library, whose slightly gloomy mock-Elizabethan interior makes the perfect setting for my discovery of a very peculiar story.

In 1613, a book was published in London, telling readers about The admirable historie of the possession and conversion of a Penitent woman. Seduced by a Magician that made her to become a Witch, and the Princes[s] of Sorcerers in the Country of Province [Provence]. The story is a striking one: an ambitious Priest called Lewes Gawfridi, living in Marseille, became a sorcerer thanks to some ill-advised leisure reading.

 

Is the conversion narrative a genre?

As a part of the project’s ongoing investigation into different sources concerned with conversion it seems pertinent to ask whether the texts we are examining constitute a genre?

 

Conversion and controversy in the modern world

It is difficult not to recognize similarities with the distant (early modern) past in the ceremony held on March 22, 2008, when the Egyptian born and naturalized Italian journalist Magdi Allam, a commentator on Middle Eastern affairs who has worked at various times for all of the most important newspapers in Italy—first at La Repubblica, then at il Corriere della Sera, and later at il Giornale—was baptized by Pope Benedict XVI during the Easter mass in St. Peter’s.