Conversion Narratives Project to Sponsor Panel at Bible Conference

Posted on 16 February 2011

Members of the project team will be joined by two young scholars to discuss the connections between the Bible and religious conversion in early modern England at a major conference on 'The Bible in the Seventeenth Century'.

Bibles on shelf

Amanda Pullan, a PhD student at Lancaster University, and Rachel Adcock, a PhD student at Loughborough University, will join Helen Smith, in a panel chaired by Abi Shinn. Pullan, Adcock, and Smith will investigate the ways in which Biblical reading and narrative traditions informed accounts of conversion and religious life in early modern England. Taken together, the three papers, on biblical imagery and devotional narratives in English households (Pullan), women's conversion narratives, the Bible and non-conformity (Adcock), and reading -- or not reading -- the Bible as a prompt to conversion (Smith), will open up questions of the narrative tradition of the Bible, gender and conversion, and the space of the home as a place for conversion.

The conference, which celebrates the quatercentenary of the King James Bible will bring together scholars from a variety of disciplines, to assess the significance of the scriptures to cultural, political, theological and philosophical history throughout the long seventeenth century.