‘I wish to be no other but as he’: Persia, masculinity, and conversion in early-seventeenth-century travel writing and drama

In classical descriptions, Persians and their rulers are seen as being given to both tyranny and femininity; early modern Europe thus inherited a view of Persia in which the performance of religious identity, political power and gender were inter-connected. Given the complex relationships between Islam, tyranny and gender, early modern European interest in the possible religious conversion of Persia and its people marks a moment at which contemporary anxieties about religious and gender identities converge. This chapter argues that European writers’ interest in the prospect of Persian conversion became tied up with their ideas about the links between Persian effeminacy and tyranny. The prospect of the conversion of Persian Shahs in early modern travel literature and drama gives rise to particular anxieties about masculinity, both in Persian figures and in the Christian European travellers and dramatists who portrayed them. Despite the tradition of viewing Persia as feminised and luxurious, the sources betray an underlying concern that Muslims’ gender and religious identities might in fact be more ‘fixed’ than those of Christian travellers, who experienced their own conversions to Islam and to Persian identities in ways that were troubling to them both as Christians and as men.

Introduction

The introduction explores existing scholarship on conversion and on the interrelationships between gender and religious experience in early modern Europe. It argues for the need to consider masculine as well as feminine modes of selfhood as malleable in the light of changing religious affiliations, and considers questions of performativity, language, materiality and orientation. Briefly outlining the contents of the collection as a whole, the introduction also points forward to important possibilities for further research and scholarship.

Converting the soundscape of women’s rituals, 1470–1560: purification, candles, and the Inviolata as music for churching

There was only one ceremony or blessing in the late Medieval Catholic rite that was reserved for laywomen -- the ritual purification or churching of a woman after childbirth. Despite the vulnerability of the traditional ceremony to charges of superstition, churching was retained in or reintegrated into early Protestant practices, including Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist ceremonies. Although churching provides a rare opportunity to connect music to a central aspect of early modern women’s lives, there has as yet been no study of the soundscape of churching ceremonies nor any exploration of how this soundscape was converted for early Protestant practice. This chapter explores how these ceremonies and rituals were adapted, with controversial elements, like blessed candles, expunged or reinterpreted. How can blessed candles illuminate the gradual conversion of the churching rite and the process of negotiation? And what can study of the persistence, use, alteration, and reuse of settings of the plainchant sequence Inviolata, integra et casta es Maria contribute to our understanding of the struggle of women for continuity in ritual and musical expressions of female reproductive power?

‘The needle may convert more than the pen’: women and the work of conversion in early modern England

This chapter opens by establishing women's centrality to the religious life of the household and community, and, in particular, their work as model converts and proselytisers. It argues that women’s devotion was neither inherently private nor inherently concerned with questions of selfhood or personal transformation. Drawing on the Queer Phenomenology of Sara Ahmed, the chapter suggests the extent to which conversion functions as a re-orientation and change in direction. The second half of the chapter takes women’s biblical needlework as a case study in material culture as an instrument of orientation. Considering a group of manuscript poems alongside the evidence of inventories and surviving stitchcraft, the authors argue for the evangelical and devotional effects of women’s decorative arts, and suggest that scriptural and religious themes were not simply emblematic but intended to work upon and transform the viewer. For early modern readers and viewers, the needle was a doubly efficacious tool, able to prick not only fabric but the consciences of those who wielded it or meditated upon its products.

‘A father to the soul and a son to the body’: gender and generation in Robert Southwell’s Epistle to his father

In an ‘Epistle to his Father’, the Jesuit priest and poet Robert Southwell signs himself ‘Your most dutiful and loving son’. Dutiful it may be, but loving this letter certainly is not. Southwell threatens his father with a horrifying vision of his ‘departing-bed’, asking him to imagine himself ‘burdened with the heavy load of your former trespasses, and gored with the sting and prick of a festered conscience’, feeling ‘the cramp of death wresting your heart-strings’. This essay considers the relationship between Southwell’s construction of gender identity and his attempts to convert English Protestants – beginning with those in his own family. Southwell’s role as a son, and his relationship to his father, is central here, as this chapter reveals the ways in which early modern masculinity is both engendered and called into question by the process of religious conversion. The chapter also considers a different kind of conversion; that which Southwell effects upon the literary genre of the letter of advice. Drawing out the etymological relationship between ‘gender’, ‘genre’ and ‘generation,’ the analysis work in the interstices of these terms, showing their centrality to the confessional narrative at the heart of this volume.

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

In The Exceeding Riches of Grace, “Dinah the Black” is listed among the witnesses who can attest to the veracity of Henry Jessey’s account of Sarah Wight’s prophetic trances in the spring and summer of 1647. The designation “Dinah the Black” stands out in a list of persons of “esteeme amongst many that fear the Lord in London”, yet what is extraordinary about Dinah’s appearance is that it is not especially marked as extraordinary. This chapter takes Dinah’s appearance as indicative of the experience of black converts, arguing that her case marks some limits of acceptance into the godly communities of English visible saints. This chapter explores the valences of visibility and godliness, singularity and universality, race and religion as they informed or are illustrated by the practices of the English Protestant saints within the context of large-scale conversions of indigenous people in the East Indies.

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

The ‘bed-trick’) was a pervasive plot device in prose fiction and other forms of Renaissance literature but appeared late as a device in English drama. The arrival and proliferation of the bed-trick can be connected to the emergence of capitalism as a system founded on a basic structure of deception by means of substitution in an increasingly aggressive commodity exchange market. This chapter discusses those plays in which the substituted lover is a Moor. In each of these plays with a Moorish woman substitute, we encounter the Moor as placeholder, a degraded substitute and commodity, the monstrous and demonized version of what women had become in bourgeois marriage. By looking at erotic trickery, at dangerous or dubious economic transactions, and religious or racial instability in Elizabethan and Early Stuart plays, we can begin to glimpse a broad pattern, one in which the fundamental anxieties and instabilities produced by new economic practices in early modern England were projected into stage actions involving rape, theft, swindles and racial or religious infidelity.

Domus humilis: the conversion of Venetian convent architecture and identity

Although the monastic principle of poverty had, for centuries, been intended to guide the architectural development of monasteries and convents, the 1260 Franciscan General Chapter of Narbonne took the radical step of recommending that communities of friars adapt existing buildings rather than build complexes ex novo. This chapter examines the adaptive and accretive practice of converting buildings of various functions to accommodate communities of women religious in Renaissance Venice. Convent archives, site and urban plans, building chronologies, patron family histories, civic building statutes all offer evidence for the patchwork and partial conversions of buildings designed to convert. Comparisons with complexes for male monastics inform this study of how patterns of patronage and urban development inflected the ways in which convent architecture publicly redefined and re-presented the identity of the communities it enclosed.

Gender and reproduction in the Spirituall experiences

This chapter explores how female authority is connected to the reproduction of religious experience in The Spirituall experiences of sundry beleevers, the first anthology of conversion narratives to appear in print when it was published in 1653. Arguing that the employment of authorial anonymity, coupled with the preponderance of female gender signifiers, foregrounds female experience in such a way as to frame the Experiences as a reproductive object, this chapter identifies how the text encourages a gendered hermeneutics: the reader goes looking for the gender of the convert and more often than not finds a woman. In order to explore the reproductive effects of this gendered bias the chapter looks firstly at how the use of authorial anonymity confers a feminised moral authority upon the text. It moves on to examine the importance of fertility as a spiritual trope for radical Protestants, before considering in detail how the Experiences utilises the symbolic associations of motherhood in a number of narratives composed by women.

Afterword

In the new geo-political circumstances that developed in the aftermath of the collapse of the USSR, and in particular the new prominence of a widely perceived antagonism between Islam and ‘the West’, conversion has once again taken a central role. The much vaunted ‘religious turn’ in early modern studies has followed in its wake, generating new perspectives on the complexities of post-Reformation devotional worlds and their interaction, work that is finding in conversion a means to better understand these worlds and our own. Moving between early modern and modern conversions, with a particular focus upon Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail (The abduction from the seraglio) as a transitional moment, this Afterword outlines the continuing urgency of the contributions collected in this volume in the context of contemporary debates.