Workshops: Faiths

Workshop 20: Changing Everything: Converting People,
Nations, Bodies, and Books

Conveners:

• Ralph Bauer, English, University of Maryland
• Nora Bellows, English, University of Maryland
• Donna Hamilton, English, University of Maryland
• Erin Kelly, English, University of Maryland

Some of the only extant texts in which European early modern women detail their personal experiences are about religious conversions. While such texts are invaluable for the study of early modern women, we suggest that these autobiographical conversion narratives do not give a complete picture of early modern womens' experiences of religious conversion. More broadly considered, conversion is simply a change. Because religion was central to European society in the early modern period, to convert may have been to change everything: one's political affiliation, class standing, social, familial and national relationships.

Our workshop investigated the full range of experiences associated with conversion in early modern England, Spain, and colonial America. To broaden our understanding of conversion, we considered short excerpts not only from women's autobiographical conversion narratives, but also from polemical texts encouraging conversion, third-person accounts of another persons conversion, and literary texts depicting religious conversion. Workshop participants used these texts to consider a variety of types of religious conversion and the experiences associated with these conversions. In discussion, we explored whether early modern women had all of these experiences as well as whether men and women had different conversion experiences.

Readings for this workshop are available here.