Conversion Narratives at the Renaissance Society of America

Posted on 3 March 2012

The Conversion Narratives team are delighted to be collaborating with the Folger Shakespeare Library to host four panels at the forthcoming Renaissance Society of America Annual Convention.

Since 1954, the Renaissance Society of America has been the leading organization in the Americas for the interdisciplinary study of the period 1300-1650. The Conversion Narratives panels -- all on Saturday 24th March at the Folger Shakespeare Library -- brings together leading scholars of religious change, and the material cultures of belief, to discuss questions of the politics and representation of early modern conversion from public sermons at Paul's Cross in London, through Spain and Italy, to the Puritan societies of colonial America. Papers will address questions of the geography of conversion, the role of objects in changing faith, and the narrative forms of belief, as well as exemplary conversions. Brief details of the panels are given below, or you can download the full set of titles and abstracts here: RSA_abstracts (PDF , 104kb).

We hope that those who are interested in this topic, and attending RSA, will also join us for an informal drink in the Round Robin and Scotch bar at the Willard International Hotel between 7.30 and 8.30 pm on Friday 23rd March. Coffee and pastries will be available before the beginning of the day's events at the Folger.

Saturday 24th March, Folger Shakespeare Library, Board Room

8.45 - 10.15

Between Orthodoxy and Heresy: Conversion in the Catholic Counter-Reformation

Chair: Thomas M. Cohen, The Catholic University of America

Respondent: LuAnn Homza, The College of William and Mary

Iberian False Conversion and the Legality of Dissimulation, Seth Kimmel, Stanford University

Scrutator Cordium: The Catholic Church and the Conversion of Henry IV, Peter A. Mazur, University of York

Serving a Master Who Cannot Die: The Conversion of St. Francis Borgia, Maria del Pilar Ryan, United States Military Academy, West Point

10.30 - 12.00

Conversion and the material book

Chair: Bill Sherman, University of York

How does the fixity of print become a problem for religious identity?, Kathleen Lynch, Folger Institute

Reading as Re-collection in Bunyan’s Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners, Vanita Neelakanta, Rider University

‘bookes, Beades and Images’: the objects of conversion in early modern England, Helen Smith, University of York

2.00 - 3.30

The literature of conversion in early modern England

Chair: Molly Murray, Columbia

Conversion and Piety in Robert Southwell’s ‘Epistle to his Father’, Hannah Crawforth, King’s College, London

Material Faith: Gendered Conversion and Richard Crashaw’s Transformative Poetics, Jenna Lay, Lehigh University

Conversion at Paul’s Cross, Holly Pickett, Washington and Lee University

3.45 - 5.15

The places and spaces of conversion

Chair: Agnès Guiderdoni, Université catholique de Louvain

Apostate “Pilgrim”: Crises of Conversion in James Wadsworth’s The English Spanish Pilgrime, Sara Torres, UCLA

The Geographies of Conversion, Abigail Shinn, University of York