Download or read book Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama written by Lieke Stelling and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A cross-religious exploration of conversion on the early modern English stage offering fresh readings of canonical and lesser-known plays.
Download or read book Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama written by Lieke Stelling and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-03 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Few subjects of the English stage have proved more alluring and enduring than religious conversion. The emergence of the Elizabethan theatre marked a profound shift in the way in which conversion was presented. If medieval drama had encouraged conversion without reservation, early Elizabethan plays started to question it. Considering over forty canonical and lesser known works, this study argues that more so than any other medium, early modern drama engaged with the question of the possibility of undergoing a radical transformation in faith and presented the period's understanding of it as fundamentally unsettled. Offering the first cross-religious exploration of conversion in early modern English drama, and presenting a new reading of William Shakespeare's tragedy Othello, Lieke Stelling reveals telling patterns in the stage's treatment of conversion and religious identity.
Download or read book Religion and Drama in Early Modern England written by Elizabeth Williamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering fuller understandings of both dramatic representations and the complexities of religious culture, this collection reveals the ways in which religion and performance were inextricably linked in early modern England. Its readings extend beyond the interpretation of straightforward religious allusions and suggest new avenues for theorizing the dynamic relationship between religious representations and dramatic ones. By addressing the particular ways in which commercial drama adapted the sensory aspects of religious experience to its own symbolic systems, the volume enacts a methodological shift towards a more nuanced semiotics of theatrical performance. Covering plays by a wide range of dramatists, including Shakespeare, individual essays explore the material conditions of performance, the intricate resonances between dramatic performance and religious ceremonies, and the multiple valences of religious references in early modern plays. Additionally, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England reveals the theater's broad interpretation of post-Reformation Christian practice, as well as its engagement with the religions of Islam, Judaism and paganism.
Download or read book Religion and Drama in Early Modern England written by Elizabeth Williamson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-08 with total page 325 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering fuller understandings of both dramatic representations and the complexities of religious culture, this collection reveals the ways in which religion and performance were inextricably linked in early modern England. Its readings extend beyond the interpretation of straightforward religious allusions and suggest new avenues for theorizing the dynamic relationship between religious representations and dramatic ones. By addressing the particular ways in which commercial drama adapted the sensory aspects of religious experience to its own symbolic systems, the volume enacts a methodological shift towards a more nuanced semiotics of theatrical performance. Covering plays by a wide range of dramatists, including Shakespeare, individual essays explore the material conditions of performance, the intricate resonances between dramatic performance and religious ceremonies, and the multiple valences of religious references in early modern plays. Additionally, Religion and Drama in Early Modern England reveals the theater's broad interpretation of post-Reformation Christian practice, as well as its engagement with the religions of Islam, Judaism and paganism.
Download or read book Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England written by Abigail Shinn and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-10-04 with total page 262 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a study of English conversion narratives between 1580 and 1660. Focusing on the formal, stylistic properties of these texts, it argues that there is a direct correspondence between the spiritual and rhetorical turn. Furthermore, by focusing on a comparatively early period in the history of the conversion narrative the book charts for the first time writers’ experimentation and engagement with rhetorical theory before the genre’s relative stabilization in the 1650s. A cross confessional study analyzing work by both Protestant and Catholic writers, this book explores conversion’s relationship with reading; the links between conversion, eloquence, translation and trope; the conflation of spiritual movement with literal travel; and the use of the body as a site for spiritual knowledge and proof.
Download or read book Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage written by Jane Hwang Degenhardt and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores the threat of Christian conversion to Islam in twelve early modern English plays. In works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, Massinger, and others, conversion from Christianity to Islam is represented as both tragic and erotic, as a fate worse than death and as a sexual seduction. Degenhardt examines the stage's treatment of this intercourse of faiths to reveal connections between sexuality, race, and confessional identity in early modern English drama and culture. In addition, she shows how England's encounter with Islam reanimated post-Reformation debates about the embodiment of Christian faith. As Degenhardt compellingly demonstrates, the erotics of conversion added fuel to the fires of controversies over Pauline universalism, Christian martyrdom, the efficacy of relics and rituals, and even the Knights of Malta.
Download or read book Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama written by and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Turn of the Soul written by Lieke Stelling and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-01-05 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on conversion as one of early modern Europe’s most pressing issues, the present book offers a comprehensive reading of artistic and literary ways in which spiritual transformations and exchanges of religious identities were given meaning.
Download or read book The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England written by Holly Crawford Pickett and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2024-03-12 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England, Holly Crawford Pickett reconceptualizes early modern religious identity by exploring the astonishing stories of serial converts: historical figures such as William Alabaster, Kenelm Digby, William Chillingworth, and Marc Antonio De Dominis, along with fictional ones, who changed their religious affiliations between Catholicism and Protestantism multiple times. Pickett argues that serial converts both reveal and helped revise early modern understandings of the self. Through investigation of the techniques that serial converts used to stage and justify their conversions, Pickett demonstrates the performative nature of the act of conversion itself, offering a counternarrative to the paradigm of sincere, private conversion that was on the rise in the tumultuous years following the Reformation. Drawing from archival investigation into the lives and works of serial converts and performance studies theory, this book shows how the genres and conventions associated with conversion shaped not only forms of communication but also the very experience of conversion. By juxtaposing plays about serial conversion—by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare—with spiritual autobiographies, Pickett highlights the shared task of convert and playwright: performing conversion for an audience. Serial converts served as uncomfortable reminders to their contemporaries that religious identity is always unverifiable. The first study to explore serial conversion as a discrete phenomenon in this era, The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England challenges confessional divisions within much early modern historiography by analyzing the surprising convergence of Protestant and Catholic in the figure of the serial convert. It also reveals a neglected strain of religious discourse in early modern England that valued mutability and flexibility even in the midst of hardening and increasingly narrow understandings of conversion.
Download or read book The Spirit of the Nation written by Hannah Korell and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation develops a feminist literary history of religious conversion in early modern drama from 1590-1634. Bringing dramatic works into conversation with an archive of biological, theological, and social discourses circulating about women during the period, I argue that early modern drama depicted women and the supernatural as central to the process of religious conversion. While the English Reformation has traditionally been considered hostile to the concept of supernatural womanhood, I reveal how the feminine occult was subsumed into the phenomenon of religious conversion. The early modern theatre was a crucial cite for exploring and disseminating the links between the occult, supernatural nature of women and the mysterious process of conversion. Through a variety of theatrical genres, the playhouse both echoed antifeminine discourses and established positive interpretations for women's powers that situated them as holy, God-given, and imperative for the burgeoning English nation-state. This dissertation thus recovers the vital importance of women to discussions of early modern conversion. My four chapters take up different female archetypes, showing how witches, wives, resurrected women, and prophetesses and martyrs were depicted as central to the process of individual, community, and national religious conversion. I reveal how playwrights often envisioned white Christian women voluntarily upholding and refashioning patriarchal structures. Rather than suffocating female power, the recovered political and social communities at the plays' close are a testament to women's work. Given women's perceived openness to the divine, their decisions to procure spiritual conversions in their husbands, kings, and lovers could be leveraged as signs of divine approval for England's conversional projects at home and abroad. The plays studied in this dissertation participate in a larger cultural movement to sanction England's imperial impulses in ways that place white women at the heart of this process"--
Download or read book The Turn of the Soul written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2012-01-06 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The religious upheavals of the early modern period and the fierce debate they unleashed about true devotion gave conversion an unprecedented urgency. With their rich variety of emotive, aesthetic and rhetoric means of expression, literature and the visual arts proved particularly well-adapted means to address, explore and represent the complex nature of conversion. At the same time, many artists and authors experimented with the notion that the expressive character of their work could cultivate a sensory experience for the viewer that enacted conversion. Indeed, focusing on conversion as one of early modern Europe’s most pressing religious issues, this volume demonstrates that conversion cannot be separated from the creative and spiritual ways in which it was given meaning. Contributors include Mathilde Bernard, John R. Decker, Xander van Eck, Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi, Lise Gosseye, Chloë Houston, Philip Major, Walter Melion, Bart Ramakers, E. Natalie Rothman, Alison Searle, Lieke Stelling, Jayme Yeo, and Federico Zuliani.
Download or read book Stage Converts written by Emily Carole George and published by . This book was released on 2020 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No concept in post-Reformation England was more fraught than conversion. Catholics and Protestant reformers fought over what conversion meant, how it was accomplished, who could achieve it, and how it related to salvation. They encouraged conversion, but distrusted converts; they feared the potential threat of forced conversion and yet used conversion as a justification for protocolonial conquest. By weaving together conversion scenes in plays from before, during, and after the Reformation, my dissertation illuminates how early modern drama could be simultaneously invested in the dominant ideologies of Protestant England and able to imaginatively experiment with the challenges, contingencies, and contradictions of post-Reformation religious identity. Diverging from recent scholarship that has emphasized early modern dramatic depictions of conversion as ironic or as invested in religious stability, I maintain that many later Elizabethan and Jacobean plays present peculiarly equivocal ways of understanding religious and moral change. Conversion scenes became conditional and exploratory as increasing state restrictions limited drama0́9s ability to serve as a communal expression of shared faith or a proselytizing instrument for new doctrines. These plays present religious identity as simultaneously ambiguous and genuine, unstable and true. Throughout this dissertation, I argue that dramatic scenes of conversion provide insight into the lived experience of post-Reformation faith, revealing theater as a communal space for audiences to explore moral difficulties, confront the tensions within their faiths, and practice dwelling in religious uncertainty.
Download or read book Turning Turk written by D. Vitkus and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-30 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Turning Turk looks at contact between the English and other cultures in the early modern Mediterranean, and analyzes the representation of that experience on the London stage. Vitkus's book demonstrates that the English encounter with exotic alterity, and the theatrical representations inspired by that encounter, helped to form the emergent identity of an English nation that was eagerly fantasizing about having an empire, but was still in the preliminary phase of its colonizing drive. Vitkus' research shows how plays about the multi-cultural Mediterranean participated in this process of identity formation, and how anxieties about religious conversion, foreign trade and miscegenation were crucial factors in the formation of that identity.
Download or read book Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England written by Daniel Vitkus and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2000-02-05 with total page 386 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: -- Greg Bak, Early Modern Literary Studies
Download or read book Turning to Food written by Fatima Farida Ebrahim and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 454 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this dissertation, I am proposing a new way to explore Anglo-Judeo-Islamic relations in early modern drama: to focus on the way food, drink, and the humoral body materializes on stage as conversion panic, which is dramatized in a range of scenarios from overt xenophobia to more nuanced scenes of acceptance and tolerance. Because the early modern English believed that diet-eating with religious others and/or eating foods from other nations-could alter their humoral makeup to the extent that their internal, physiological bodies underwent a religious conversion, they were constantly and consciously aware of the looming possibility of conversion. The hydraulic premise of humoral physiology thus extended, I contend, to religious identity: just as humors were fluid, so too was religious identity. Food, which is at once a central non-natural for the humoral body and an essentially theatrical element, provides an important point of convergence for investigating religious difference in early modern drama. To examine food's role in the Anglo-Judeo-Islamic equation is to better understand how the early modern English simultaneously managed their fears, maintained their cultural and religious identities, and developed or nurtured economic and political ties with the other. To offer a more comprehensive picture of English interactions with religious others, I study early modern English histories, travel narratives, medical tracts, sermons, and other pamphlets, in addition to the English representation of religious others on stage. The plays I discuss span approximately forty-seven years, starting with Robert Wilson's The Three Ladies of London (1584) and extending to the late Jacobean sequel to The Fair Maid of the West (c. 1631) by Thomas Heywood. I conclude that examining interfaith relationships from the perspective of foodways widens the possibility that the early modern English did not always look to the Turk, Jew, or Catholic in contempt. Rather, studying these interfaith encounters in tandem with humoral theory and culinary practices establishes the fact that the early modern English were conscious of their sameness with others, and responded to this awareness with attitudes ranging from outright resistance to compassionate acceptance.
Download or read book Images of the Muslim Woman in Early Modern English Drama written by Öz Öktem and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-01-29 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Early modern scholarship often reads the dramatic representations of the Muslim woman in the light of postcolonial identity politics, which sees an organic relationship between the West’s historical domination of the East and the Western discourse on the East. This book problematizes the above trajectory by arguing that the assumption of a power relation between a dominating West and a subordinate East cannot be sustained within the context of the political and historical realities of early modern Europe. The Ottoman Empire remained as a dominant superpower throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and was perceived by Protestant England both as a military and religious threat and as a possible ally against Catholic Spain. Reading a series of early modern plays from Marlowe to Beaumont and Fletcher alongside a number of historical sources and documents, this book re-interprets the image of Islamic femininity in the period’s drama to reflect this overturn in the world’s power balances, as well as the intricate dynamics of England’s intensified contact with Islam in the Mediterranean.
Download or read book Mythologies of the Prophet Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture written by Matthew Dimmock and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-05-31 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book explores how the figure of the Prophet Muhammad was misrepresented in English and wider Christian culture between 1480 and 1735. By tracing the ways in which 'Mahomet' was written and rewritten, contested and celebrated, this study explores notions of identity and religion, and the resonances of this history today.
