Literature and Conversion in the English Renaissance

Following the Reformation conversion was an inescapable part of English culture. Conversion could refer to a change in religious identity or an intensification of spiritual feeling. The latter was understood as a stage of life for many Protestants, but the former was a source of huge anxiety and risk depending on the religious climate of the day. Conversion was explored in a variety of literary genres, giving birth to its own form of literary expression in the conversion narrative, a genre of life writing closely associated with Protestant nonconformists such as John Bunyan. Poets, including John Donne and Richard Crashaw, who had themselves undergone conversion, reflected on the soul’s capacity for change, often closely intertwining ideas of figurative turning with the turn of the soul. Conversion, particularly that of non-Christians or Christians who “turned Turk” by adopting Islam, was a source of spectacle and entertainment in the early modern theaters. These dramas evinced both fear and fascination with the Muslim “other,” depicting a fabricated and orientalized Islamic world in which souls are bartered like commodities. Shakespeare and Marlowe staged the conversion of Jews, revealing deep prejudices about the faith and commenting both on enforced conversion as a form of punishment and the withholding of true conversion from those whose racial identity and bloodline were thought to preclude assimilation into the Christian community. Conversion thus moves discursively through the literature of the English Renaissance, often reflecting powerful anxieties about religious instability.