DUE TO UNFORESEEN CIRCUMSTANCES WE REGRET THAT THIS EVENT WILL NOT TAKE PLACE Masterclass: "Explaining Apostasy:Three Spaniards in London, 1621-29"

In the 1620s two Spanish monks and one English seminary student from Spain turned up in London as apostates from Catholicism. Each then published an autobiographical text explaining the reasons for his conversion. These pamphlets tell much the same non-Augustinian story, one of growing disaffection from an ancestral faith, from which emerges a more or less overt appeal for recognition and support from the reading public. Readers today can find much to learn from these brief lives, not just about the differences between the two religious cultures that the authors are seeking to bridge, but also about the broader possibilities (and pitfalls) of using autobiographies as historical sources.

Recommended reading prior to this Masterclass The Spanish Monke (PDF , 4,020kb)

James Amelang (Ph.D Princeton 1982) has taught at the universities of Princeton and Florida, Gainsville. Since 1989 he has been Professor of Early Modern History at the Autonomous University of Madrid. He has held visiting fellowships at UCLA, Yale and the University of Connecticut. Among his numerous publications are: A Journal of the Plague Year. the diary of the Barcelona Tanner Miquel Parets (1991); The Flight of Icarus: artisan autobiography in early modern Europe (1998) and Parallel histories: Jewish and Islamic converts in early modern Spain (2013).