Improbable Lives: a One-Eyed Soldier, a Dervish, and Other Converts in Early Modern Rome

The disorienting experience of travel and the complexities of assimilation into a foreign society were common features of the history of Early Modern Europe, but they took on a special meaning in Italy, where an increasingly complex and organized clerical bureaucracy did its best to determine the religion of the men and women who arrived there and convert them to Catholicism, by persuasion or force.  The stories that resulted are full of surprising twists and humorous detail that reveal much about the way religion was lived and experienced in one of the world’s oldest religious capitals.

This lecture is the fourth in a series entitled Cultural Encounters: Travel, Religion, and Identity in the Early Modern World, which explores the findings and implications of the research coming out of the Conversion Narratives in Early Modern Europe project.

Cultural Encounters poster (PDF , 738kb)