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CONVERSION NARRATIVES
IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Tales of Turning

Abigail Shinn

EARLY MODERN LITERATURE IN HISTORY

General Editors: Cedric C. Brown and Andrew Hadfield
Early Modern Literature in History

Series Editors
Cedric C. Brown
Department of English
University of Reading
Reading, UK

Andrew Hadfield
School of English
University of Sussex
Brighton, UK
Within the period 1520–1740, this large, long-running series, with inter-
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 Abigail Shinn

Conversion Narratives
in Early Modern
England
Tales of Turning
Abigail Shinn
Goldsmiths, University of London
London, UK

Early Modern Literature in History

ISBN 978-3-319-96576-5 ISBN 978-3-319-96577-2 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96577-2

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 Turne me O Lord my God unto thee, and I shall be turned, conuert me
unto thee, and I shall be conuerted.
Henry Goodcole, A True Declaration of the happy Conuersion, contrition,
and Christian preparation of Francis Robinson (1618)
For Mary and Michael Shinn
 Acknowledgements

This book started life while I was employed as a postdoctoral research

fellow on the AHRC-funded project ‘Conversion Narratives in Early
Modern Europe’ at the University of York. My principle debt is to the
project team, Helen Smith, Simon Ditchfield and Peter Mazur, who not
only supported the initial research but also read the manuscript in mul-
tiple versions during the intervening years. They continue to be a source
of inspiration and encouragement. York’s Humanities Research Centre,
then under the guiding hand of the late Jane Moody, and the Centre
for Renaissance and Early Modern Studies were generous and collegial
environments in which to think and write. I also wish to thank the Harry
Ransom Center for awarding me a fellowship in 2014 which allowed me
to work with their rare books collection. Librarians and archivists at the
British Library, Bodleian Library, Downside Abbey archives and Folger
Shakespeare Library, have also provided invaluable expertise.
I have benefitted immeasurably from the knowledge and advice of a
number of colleagues. Alex Davis, Andrew Gordon and Emilie Murphy
have kindly read the full manuscript and provided invaluable suggestions.
Mark Jenner, Alison Searle, Lizzie Swann, Kevin Killeen, Jane Rickard
and Piers Brown have read various chapters, saving me from a number
of mistakes. Any remaining errors are of course my own. I also wish to
thank the following for their sustaining conversation and friendship:
Helen Smith, Lena Liapi, Lizzie Swann, Emilie Murphy, Jane Rickard,
Martin Butler, Neil Rhodes, Alex Davis, Matthew Augustine, Katie
Garner, Clare Gill, Catherine Spencer, Christina Alt, Bronwyn Wallace,

ix
x    Acknowledgements

Carole Sweeney, Charlotte Scott, Ellie Wilson, Amy Ennis, Helen Cook,
Tom Shinn, Louise Dumican, Simon Dumican and Katie Dumican.
My students at York, Leeds, St Andrews and most recently Goldsmiths,
University of London, have been a vital source of energy and enthusi-
asm. My sincere thanks also go to the Palgrave Macmillan editorial and
production team, Andrew Hadfield, Cedric C. Brown, Camille Davies
and Ben Doyle.
In addition, I would like to take the opportunity to thank the local
library in my home town of Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk. This was where
I first understood the importance of having the freedom to read. Finally,
I have been supported throughout by my partner Tom Dumican and our
daughter Eve, my debt to them both is beyond measure. This book is
dedicated to my parents, Mary and Michael Shinn.
 Contents

1 Introduction: Tales of Turning 1

2 Take Up and Read: The Convert and the Book 29

3 Converting Souls and Words: Tropes, Eloquence and

Translation 77

4 Narrative Topographies and the Geographies of

Conversion 119

5 Witnessing the Body: Corporeal Conversions 169

6 Conclusion: Bunyan’s Turn 213

Bibliography 223

Index 245

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Tales of Turning

The Protestant writer and clergyman Thomas Wilson provides a two-part

definition of conversion in his Christian Dictionarie (1612), one of the
earliest concordances of the Bible in English. Using the language of motion
and labour, conversion is described as both a passive and active process:

The turning, or totall change of an elect Sinner from sinne to God: and in
this signification is comprehended, both faith and Repentance, euen the
whole worke of grace. Psal. 51, 14. And sinners shalbe Conuerted to thee.
This is Passiue Conuersion, wherein we suffer God to worke vpon vs, but
our selues by our Naturall power, worke nothing, vnlesse it be to hinder
the worke of Grace, what wee may.
A turning from some perticuler sinne or sinnes, whereby we haue offended
God or man. Luke 22, 32. When thou art conuerted. Ier. 31, 18. Conuert
thou me, and I shall be Conuerted. This is an Actiue Conuersion, performed
by men already regenerate, who being already renewed by grace, doo work
together with his Grace; Conuerting grace being accompanied with assist-
ing and supporting grace.1

A passive conversion involves the elect believer ‘turning…from sinne to

God’ in a movement provoked exclusively by the ‘worke’ of grace upon
the soul. In contrast, active conversion is experienced by the ‘regener-
ate’ soul who has already received grace but has committed a sin that
they must work alongside God to resolve. Election theology demands

© The Author(s) 2018 1

A. Shinn, Conversion Narratives in Early Modern England,
Early Modern Literature in History,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96577-2_1
2 A. SHINN

that conversion be restricted to the saved so Wilson’s definition leaves no

space for the conversion of the unregenerate. Conversion in both forms,
active and passive, is here explicitly connected to the motion of ‘turn-
ing’—a kinetic process which combines metamorphosis with the action
of moving towards or away from a particular position. Wilson is working
from conversion’s etymological root in the Latin convertĕre which means
‘to turn about, turn in character or nature, transform or translate’.2 This
movement can be imagined metaphorically as the convert turning so that
their field of vision incorporates a new vista inhabited by God, leaving
a sinful perspective behind. Turning is therefore necessarily a process of
(re)orientation as the convert turns towards God and away from error
and superstition, situating himself or herself within spiritual space. The
language of labour or travail further links the motion of turning to an
understanding of the convert as an object onto which has been exerted
force, whether a purely external pressure (‘worke upon’) or a combi-
nation of external and internal influences (‘work together’). Wilson’s
turning convert thereby testifies to the forceful work of God upon the
soul of the elect believer. This is work which recalls the labour of partu-
rition, the archetypal metaphor for the pain of spiritual transformation,
so that conversion’s turning becomes linked to a bodily, and feminised,
understanding of renewal and rebirth.3
Wilson’s definition also emphasises that conversion is often an ongo-
ing process, rather than a singular event, as the convert may sin and
therefore need to once again turn to God for further assistance and
support. What emerges is an image of the convert as a receptive entity
subject to the push and pull of divine forces, an object which turns, but
which may well need to turn again. A turn does not necessarily result
in enduring stasis or stability, and if a turn becomes a revolution, then
the convert may find himself or herself back where they started. In an
age when the sins of the nicodemite, equivocator and church papist were
joined by the perceived hypocrisy of the serial convert, the kinetic qual-
ities of conversion could thus signal a dangerous ambivalence. In the
words of John Heywood’s epigram Of turnyng (1562): ‘Halfe turne or
whole turne, where turners be turning / Turnying keepes turners from
hangyng and burning’.4 The paradox which lies at the heart of conver-
sion is that its affinity with the language of movement results in fears of
instability.
The central concern of this book is the representation of these
different tales of turning in conversion narratives, texts that
 1 INTRODUCTION: TALES OF TURNING 3

incorporate a story of a change in religious affiliation or a moment

of spiritual transformation. My argument is that by studying their
formal and stylistic properties we can excavate the ways writers both
mirror, and attempt to contain, the kinetic qualities of conversion.
In the act of turning, the convert asks ‘where am I?’ and ‘where is
God?’ In order to orientate himself or herself spiritually, the turn-
ing convert positions themselves textually, making visible important
correspondences between the motions and effects of conversion,
and the understanding of rhetoric’s power to move and persuade.
The first book-length study to pay sustained attention to the literary
composition of conversion narratives, Conversion Narratives in Early
Modern England will reveal an often-symbiotic relationship between
turned words and turned souls, and reappraise our understanding of
the interconnectedness of early modern literary and religious cul-
tures more generally.
The motivations that lie behind the composition of a conversion
account are closely related to the kinetic qualities of religious change.
The act of writing about conversion is ostensibly designed in some
way to fix, or stabilise, a religious turn and prevent it from being per-
ceived as a presage to further movement, but this is a difficult effect to
achieve. For example, the tension between two religious positions—on
the cusp of turning and on the straight course which follows a successful
turn—is one of the primary compositional pressures faced by the writ-
ers of conversion accounts. The finality of the eventual turn to faith is
always precarious, and the potential for it to appear inconclusive has to
be carefully negotiated. In looking to provide a textual stopping place or
point of termination, writers also have to go through a process of literary
movement and metamorphosis, comparable to the motions experienced
by the changed believer, which serve to create and animate the con-
vert within the text. The impulse to stabilise through an act of literary
construction (a process counter-intuitively predicated upon movement
and transformation) is accompanied by the urge to articulate. Converts
and their witnesses see the broadcasting of their experiences as an act
of charity or an opportunity for evangelism which can provide comfort
and assurance for those who are already saved, and may prompt change
in the reader who is not. In the process, they have to wrestle with how
to portray the unseen and silent transformation that has taken place in
the soul. Immense pressure is consequently placed upon descriptive lan-
guage as the numinous and indescribable have to be given concrete and
4 A. SHINN

recognisable form. As Brian Cummings argues, ‘conversio defies the ordi-

nary usages of language to express it, for it is a movement without prepa-
ration, even without syntax’.5 Labouring to express the inexpressible,
conversion writers thus engage in a careful, and often startlingly inven-
tive, exploration of the limits and possibilities afforded by language and
rhetoric.
However difficult to satisfy, the primary motivations which lie behind
the composition of a conversion narrative, i.e. a desire to substantiate or
prove that a religious turn has taken place and an urge to proclaim in
order to inspire stability or further movement in others, give rise to a
series of resourceful compositional strategies. Many of these strategies
self-consciously harness the kinetic nature of conversion by conflating lit-
eral and figurative movements in order to add symbolic weight to the
recollection of religious experience. For example, the route traversed
by the travelling convert becomes a spiritual journey and the action of
hunting parallels the pursuit of souls.6 This book is focused on unrav-
elling conjoined religious and literary movements such as these, and by
paying serious attention to the compositional choices made by conver-
sion writers between 1580 and 1660, I highlight an intricate network of
conjoined rhetorical and spiritual turnings. This network is activated by
an affective reading culture which sees interactions with the codex, scrip-
tural or otherwise, as a possible catalyst for spiritual change, and the first
chapter places conversion at the heart of the phenomenology of reading
by examining in detail the intimate relationship between the convert and
the book.
This research is indebted to a rich body of literary and historical
enquiry, loosely understood as a part of the ‘turn’ to religion in early
modern studies, which has transformed our understanding of religious
culture and its relationship to literature.7 Historians charting the per-
sistence of pre-Reformation beliefs and practices in Tudor and Stuart
England have redrawn the parameters of religious culture and ques-
tioned a teleological reading of Protestantism’s dominance.8 In literary
studies, critics have researched the impact of the Reformation upon lit-
erature, placed language at the heart of arguments about doctrinal dif-
ference and religious identity, and recovered a Catholic literary culture
which has all too often been obscured by a focus upon Protestantism’s
relationship to the book.9 Coupled with a greater understanding of the
interactions between East and West during the period and the phenom-
enon of ‘turning Turk’, early modern England’s religious landscape is
 1 INTRODUCTION: TALES OF TURNING 5

now recognised as crowded and diverse.10 Correspondingly, there has

emerged a particular focus upon the connections between conversion
and writing practices. Within this critical milieu, the conversion narrative
has been explored principally as a mode of life-writing, with a particular
focus upon the development of a Protestant identity and the religious
literature of writers such as John Bunyan.11 In recent years, a growing
understanding of autobiography’s complexity in the early modern period
has led scholars to look for the traces of a life in a range of often far
from obvious sources, including almanacs and account books, and to
emphasise the form’s improvisatory nature and experimentalism.12 In
tandem, Brooke Conti and Kathleen Lynch have complicated our under-
standing of the multifarious pressures placed upon the construction of
a religious life, situating Protestant autobiography within the context of
religious controversy, the print trade, and networks of congregation and
community.13
My approach to the conversion narrative is one which shifts the focus
from the concerns of life-writing and autobiography toward the formal
and structural qualities of the conversion experience as a literary phenome-
non. I am less interested in the ‘self’ behind the text, or the status of con-
version narratives as ‘acts of self-interpretation’, in D. Bruce Hindmarsh’s
words, than the compositional choices which go into creating or perform-
ing that ‘self’ as a persuasive entity.14 As Karl F. Morrison points out, the
experience of conversion cannot be recovered through texts, ‘what we can
study is a document, a written composition, and whatever kinds of under-
standing it may manifest’.15 Reading Morrison, Ryan Szpiech describes
the resulting gap between experience and text as the difference between
the ‘thing felt’ and the ‘thing made’.16 In focusing upon the written doc-
uments of conversion, the ‘thing made’ in Szpiech’s terms, I make no
claims for the truth of what is described. Rather, I outline the narrative
typologies and rhetorical forms that are harnessed by conversion writers
in order to construct a persuasive, and sometimes moving, narrative.17 In
short, I am looking to their style (elocutio) and organisation (dipositio).18
At first glance, this may appear to be a reading of religious discourse as
wholly pragmatic rather than spiritually or morally inflected. On the con-
trary, in looking to the ways in which conversion narratives seek to per-
suade their readers, rhetoric and narrative are revealed as instrumental
participants in the shaping of early modern religious identity. This is in
contrast to readings of conversion accounts as religious and political works
whose literary construction is little more than ‘word-games’ and ‘sleight
6 A. SHINN

of hand’.19 An attendance to the literary and rhetorical complexity of

conversion accounts thereby provides a (historicised) formalist lens into
a body of work more commonly examined as documentary evidence and
biography. Molly Murray has compellingly argued that conversion pro-
foundly influenced poetic style in the early modern period and my debt
to her groundbreaking work will become readily apparent.20 Conversion
narratives, in contrast, have not been afforded the same level of forensic
scrutiny.21 My aim is to redress this imbalance and highlight the rhetorical
self-consciousness and structural logic of narrative works which incorpo-
rate a story or stories of conversion.22
My chosen chronology is a departure from critical work on conversion
narratives which have tended to focus on mid- to late seventeenth-cen-
tury spiritual autobiography. I begin in the 1580s, a decade marked
by the Jesuit Mission and the concurrent struggles of Elizabethan
Protestants to secure further godly reformation, apostolic efforts charac-
terised by Peter Marshall as ‘two missions to convert the nation’.23 The
book’s period of interest ends with the 1650s, arguably a high point for
the publication of conversion narratives, particularly those linked to the
Independent gathered churches.24 As I discuss in my conclusion, I have
chosen to end my study here because I see the advent of Restoration
nonconformity and particularly the publication, and enduring popularity,
of the works of John Bunyan, as signalling an important shift in the rela-
tionship between conversion and rhetoric. I utilise texts on religion and
rhetoric produced prior to 1580 to provide context, but all of the con-
version accounts analysed fall roughly into this time frame.
My chronology has been dictated by the fact that prior to the 1580s
conversion narratives were not circulating in significant numbers. The
1580s notably saw an increased Protestant self-confidence and the emer-
gence of a new Protestant literary culture, changes to which Catholic
writers responded.25 Exceptions include the stories of conversion embed-
ded in John Foxe’s collection of Protestant martyrologies, Actes and
Monuments (first ed. 1563), but Foxe’s focus is primarily upon perse-
cution, suffering and martyrdom, and conversion often appears sec-
ondary to these issues.26 Conversion is also notably discussed in Actes
and Monuments as resulting from the inspiring example provided by
Protestant martyrs whose good deaths exert persuasive force upon wit-
nesses and readers, but again the details surrounding these conversions
are marked by their brevity.27 By the late sixteenth century the number of
conversion narratives in circulation is still relatively low, but steadily rises
throughout the early years of the seventeenth century, culminating in a
 1 INTRODUCTION: TALES OF TURNING 7

significant number of printed conversion accounts produced in the 1650s,

many of which take the form of anthologies or compilations. My rationale
is that by focusing upon an earlier period in which the genre is nascent
and relatively unstable, as well as the fertile mid-seventeenth century, it
is possible to isolate a number of formal and structural properties which
quickly become concretised, and which are often used by opposing con-
fessions, prior to the rise of Protestant nonconformity and its vocal pro-
motion and broadcasting of spiritual experience. This choice also allows
me to analyse conversion narratives which are separate and distinct from
the religious writings of John Bunyan, even as they act as an important
prehistory for his spiritual autobiography Grace Abounding to the Chief of
Sinners (1666) and his later allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).
Significantly, by highlighting works concerned with conversion from
the relatively understudied Tudor and Stuart eras, this book posits that
the form of the conversion narrative is profoundly influenced by argu-
ments circulating in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries about
the value and use of rhetoric, and its relationship to different forms of
religious expression and sacramental theology. The early modern world
is intensely rhetorically literate and educated readers are closely attuned
to nuances of style and form; while interest in rhetoric is all-pervasive, it
is during the 1570s and 1580s in particular that we see the publication
of a number of works expressly concerned with the function of rhetori-
cal figures and tropes and how they might best be utilised in English.28
These include Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) and George
Puttenham’s Art of English Poesie (1589). As critics have pointed out,
by foregrounding an interest in figures, works such as these ‘managed
actually to take classical rhetoric forwards instead of merely summaris-
ing it’.29 One of my contentions in this book is that an interest in the
expressive function of figures and tropes, and their persuasive capabili-
ties, is of primary importance to the writers of conversion narratives
in the years 1580–1660. Particular tropes are imbued with a powerful
religious significance, most commonly when they are overlaid with the
lived and felt experience of the convert-in-the-world. I therefore date
the stirrings of the conversion narrative as a genre to roughly the same
period in which English rhetoric began to show a marked fascination
with the use and value of figures and tropes, a fascination which quickly
became yoked to the evangelising impulses of both Catholic mission
and Protestant Reformation. An investment in figuration has historically
been a hallmark of spiritual autobiography through the ages, and a fea-
ture which Anne Hunsaker Hawkins argues is connected to the form’s
8 A. SHINN

universalising impulse as individual experience is subsumed into sacred

history.30 What makes the early modern period so startling and inventive
in this regard, however, is the extent to which the motions of rhetorical
figuration were understood as analogous to the workings and effects of
conversion, an equivalency which was harnessed for apostolic effect by
divergent confessions.31
There is a particular affinity between rhetorical tropes such as meta-
phor and simile, and conversionary turning, which it is worth touching
upon briefly here, although the link will be explored in more detail in
Chapter 3. In The Garden of Eloquence (1577), a rhetoric book produced
by the Protestant minister Henry Peacham, Peacham employs a trope
which places the phenomenon of conversion at the heart of the figurative
turn when discussing ‘The fyrst foundation of Tropes’:

[…] for example, when we might say properly, men continue in their
wickednesse, and will not be conuerted, we thinke it may be better sayd
by translated speech, thus, men slumber in wickednesse, and are so fast
asleepe in sinne, that when they be called, they heare not, yea, although ye
call and cry to them in their eares, yet can they not awake, for they heare
you not, thus this sentence is much mended by borrowed speech […]32

Peacham’s employment of an image of a potential convert slumbering in

sin, and deaf to God’s call, illustrates the power of tropes to embellish
speech. Borrowed speech in the form of metaphor mends the sentence
and makes it more effective, but the use of an example of a failed conver-
sion to exemplify the usefulness of tropes indicates a self-consciousness
about the relationship between tropes and religious turning.33 Peacham’s
example reminds us that ‘trope’ has an etymological root in ‘turn’,
derived from the Latin tropus and the Greek τρόπος. To trope is there-
fore to engage in a linguistic act of movement and transformation akin
to both bodily and spiritual systems of orientation (although Peacham’s
metaphor in fact describes a failure to turn). Methods of rhetorical embel-
lishment such as metaphor and simile have an intrinsic connection with
the action of turning, the primary kinetic register of conversion, and this
fundamentally effects writers’ and readers’ conception of the force and
usefulness of rhetorical figuration when it is used in the service of expli-
cating a conversion experience. This link between the trope and the con-
versionary turn, and significantly its manifestation as an overlaying of the
literal with the figural, is a phenomenon which binds the development
 1 INTRODUCTION: TALES OF TURNING 9

of the English conversion narrative to the concerns of English rhetorical

theory as writers subsume arguments about the power and importance of
figuration into their attempts to express the ineffable nature of spiritual
change.
Conversion narratives that use tropes as a representative system
imbued with religious signification testify not only to the rising interest
in rhetorical figuration in English, but also to its complicated and rel-
atively recent history as an important strand in Reformation argument.
Rhetoric lay at the heart of the language of religious difference and sac-
ramental change in the early modern era, a phenomenon epitomised
by debates surrounding the constitution of matter and metaphor in
the Eucharist.34 From Thomas Cranmer’s argument that the Eucharist
is symbolic because ‘Christe spake in Parables, Metaphores, tropes and
figures…chiefly when he spake of the sacramentes, he vsed figuratiue
speches’, to the more conservative Stephen Gardiner’s reasoning that it
is ‘daungerous’ to try to attach human language to the divine ‘and by
diuisyng of a figure, or metaphore, bryng it within the compasse of our
buysie reason’, commentators from across the religious spectrum recog-
nise the important role played by metaphor in sacramental theology.35 As
Stephen Greenblatt argues, in early modern England: ‘Never perhaps has
so much depended upon a figure of speech: in trope we trust’.36 Despite
rhetorical figuration ostensibly providing a fault line between confes-
sions in relation to the Eucharist, both Catholics and Protestants none-
theless relied upon the language arts as a necessary tool for explaining
and constructing religious experience. Debora Shuger argues that ‘sacred
rhetoric is a polemical issue, possibly even a heresy’ in the early modern
period, pointing out that the charge of using rhetoric is wielded by dif-
ferent confessional groups as a means of deriding and undermining their
opponents. Shuger states, however, that while the sacred grand style ‘is
not supposed to exist’, it is a pervasive feature, if not the defining charac-
teristic, of Christian argument.37 Rhetoric and its figures are everywhere
in early modern culture, but its divisive relationship with sacramental
theology and religious argument, coupled with the affiliation between
troping and turning, mean that its use in works which discuss or recount
stories of conversion is a serious matter and demands sustained and care-
ful attention on the part of readers.
While rhetoric is accepted as one of the dominant influences upon both
literary and religious cultures in the early modern period, it is perhaps less
obvious how the writers and readers of conversion texts comprehended
10 A. SHINN

the workings and effects of narrative. A selective recounting of events

shaped by teleological impulses which in conversion texts are often linked
to divine providence, narrative typically gratifies a reader’s desire for order
and causation. A conversion narrative can thereby provide structure for an
individual’s experiences, and it also typically has embedded within it a sat-
isfying, and potentially replicable, dynamic of conflict leading to resolution
or closure. Narrative endings ostensibly provide a fixative or conclusion to
a story of transformation, thereby providing stability and coherence, but
they also have a historical link to religious and mythical systems of crea-
tion and destruction. Frank Kermode argues that narrative endings within
a rectilinear system have an explicit relationship to the language of apoc-
alypse.38 For early moderns, narrative’s eschatological impulses may be
especially attractive as many believers, most notably Protestants of a more
godly bent, envisaged the conversion of souls, particularly Muslims and
Jews, to be a necessary precursor to the second coming of Christ.39 Peter
Brooks, using Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle, also argues for a ‘tex-
tual erotics’ which understands plot as a form of desire which propels the
reader forward through a narrative in search of an anticipated end, a mode
of readerly projection which may have a particular power in a textual cul-
ture which relies upon narrative typologies, archetypes and exemplars
when creating religious plots.40 It is worth noting, however, that conver-
sion narratives can produce a dilatory and deferred sense of narrative clo-
sure as they reflect an understanding of conversion as an ongoing, rather
than finite process. As Kathleen Lynch points out, for all of the emphasis
placed on a stable end point in conversion narratives ‘the story of self thus
told was nevertheless one of new beginnings’.41
A story of a conversion, whether understood as an ending or a begin-
ning, in many respects corresponds to what H. Porter Abbott calls a
‘masterplot’, stories that ‘we tell over and over in myriad forms and that
connect vitally with our deepest values, wishes, and fears’.42 Masterplots
are often instinctively conferred authority by the reader as we recog-
nise their contours and patterns. Early modern conversion accounts fre-
quently use pre-existing narrative models and typologies, many of them
taken from scripture, to organise and explicate their description of a
change in religious character; this reinforces the strength of the conver-
sion masterplot.43 As Brian Cummings argues: ‘Conversion is always a
narrative of doubling and repetition. It is never original, but conforms
to a pattern’.44 Typical models include the stories of the archetypal con-
verts St. Paul and St. Augustine, as well as the scriptural examples pro-
vided by the return of the prodigal son, the story of Mary Magdalene,
 1 INTRODUCTION: TALES OF TURNING 11

and the Israelites flight out of Egypt.45 Converts similarly have a number
of contemporary archetypes to draw upon, such as the Italian convert
to Protestantism, Galeazzo Caracciolo and his compatriot the famous
Protestant backslider Francis Spira, archetypes which, respectively, oper-
ate as a model and a cautionary warning.46 Jeffrey Shoulson has also
recently argued that the figure of the converted and converting Jew is
central to a wide variety of ‘fictions of conversion’ and embodies ‘the
promise and the peril of change’.47 In the process of being narrativised,
an individual’s conversion story often organises itself around a number of
paradigmatic expectations based upon these models: a moment of sen-
sory revelation; the catalysing power of reading; a period wandering in
the wilderness followed by a homecoming or return. Recognisable nar-
rative typologies such as these add authority to the story while also pro-
viding a further layer of replicable patterning for the reader. As Lewis
R. Rambo argues, the narrative theory of conversion, in which the con-
vert finds a ‘new’ story around which to structure their life narrative,
‘involves resonating with a story… finding or building connections
between “my” story and “the” story, and retelling or incorporating of
the story into one’s own life narrative’.48 This particular phenomenon
is most obvious in texts which self-consciously allude to the influence of
a particular convert; Richard Norwood’s use of the experiences of St.
Augustine to shape his own Confessions (discussed in Chapter 2) is one
such example.
Molly Murray has noted that official formats, including Responsa
Scholarum questionnaires filled out by entrants to the English College
in Rome, structure the narrativisation of conversion within Catholic
institutions, providing an often overlooked mode of Catholic life-writ-
ing which makes forms of narrative patterning explicit.49 The following
of an authorised rubric, albeit more loosely conceived, also takes place
in printed works which collect together a number of different conver-
sion accounts and structures them according to a predetermined sche-
matic. In the case of the anthology of Protestant conversion narratives
the Spirituall Experiences of Sundry Believers (1653), endorsed by the
Welsh nonconformist Vavasor Powell and attributed to the preacher and
publisher of parliamentary newsbooks Henry Walker, this pattern takes
the following form: movement between despair and comfort, an intense
moment of spiritual awareness, a recitation of promises taken from scrip-
ture, followed by a list of proofs of conversion.50 This narrative conform-
ity helps to yoke together a number of potentially disparate voices into a
congregation.
12 A. SHINN

To a greater or lesser extent, all accounts of conversion respond to, or

subsume within their workings, the narrative patterns and models pro-
vided by previous converts and other outside authorities, whether taken
from history and scripture, the experiences of members of the new com-
munity or the dictates of institutional bureaucracy. This ensures that
the adoption of a ‘new’ story carries with it the accumulated weight of
past authority. Narrative also has the potential to offer a spatio-tempo-
ral reading of religious experience which allows the reader to empathise
with the experiences of the central convert; an act of identification often
made possible by the depiction of extraordinary events that occur in a
mundane or quotidian environment. This means that conversion narra-
tives have the capacity to shape behaviour within religious communities
by (re)producing narrative patterns which can be endlessly copied and
appropriated.51 Identifying and analysing the narrative components of
these texts will therefore aid our understanding of how writing prac-
tices helped to produce and broadcast archetypes for conversion expe-
riences, and provide a catalyst for further change.52 Often a profoundly
social act, the composition of a conversion narrative reflects, and contrib-
utes towards, a sedimentary narrative culture in which stories of spiritual
change accrue more souls and more authority over time in a process
which lends legitimacy to an individual’s experiences and brings them
into a corporate or communal textual space defined by shared structures
and expectations.
The use of familiar narrative models and patterns does not preclude
a startling inventiveness and flexibility on the part of conversion writ-
ers, however, particularly in relation to genre and modes of presentation.
Primarily used to describe a change from one confessional identity or reli-
gion to another, conversion also encompasses moments of spiritual meta-
morphosis or awakening, as well as more formal processes of admittance,
or readmittance to a church or congregation.53 Conversion moreover
has connections to wider systems of transformation and metamorphosis.
The complex etymology of the term in the early modern period includes
not only the language of religious change in various forms, but also the
conversion of monastic buildings to secular or Protestant use after the
Reformation, the translation of texts from one language to another
and the moment at which an individual enters a monastic community.54
Conversion is also a metaphor related to the arts and crafts and thereby
retains a link to the language of material or physical change.55 The elas-
ticity of the term is also reflected in the discursive effects wrought by
 1 INTRODUCTION: TALES OF TURNING 13

conversion upon people’s conception of identity and self-hood. Recent

work on the intersection of gender and conversion, for example, has high-
lighted the ways religious transformation was necessarily accompanied by
shifts in personal and social identity, and ‘reshaped gendered experiences
and ideologies’ in the early modern period.56 While the focus of this book
is the composition of accounts of religious or spiritual conversion, I none-
theless remain attentive to how this multivalent etymology is reflected in
writers’ approaches to conversion between the years 1580 and 1660.
The conversion narrative is neither a fixed nor stable generic category for
most of the period under study here and cannot really be recognised as
such until the outpouring of accounts of religious experience published by
Protestant groups in the 1650s.57 Even after this date, however, conversion
narratives continue to elide different textual forms and engage in cross-fer-
tilisation, borrowings and conflations with other recognisable genres.
Stories of conversion are embedded within a wide array of different textual
formats including travel narratives, prison narratives, martyrologies, gallows
confessions, sermons, recantations, spiritual guides, meditation aids, news
reports, polemic, letters, spoofs and satires. This fertile but complicated
mixture, in which conversion is an experimental and changeable site for
literary reflection even when writers replicate familiar narrative paradigms,
produces a far more complex view of the relationship between conversion
and narrative than is often recognised by studies focused primarily upon
conversion narratives as a mode of spiritual autobiography.
This book also uses a broadly cross-confessional perspective, mak-
ing connections and highlighting continuities between conversion texts
which recount the spiritual transformations of both Protestants and
Catholics, and (when the occasion presents itself) those who ‘turn Turk’
and then recant, or Muslims who embrace Christianity. In contrast to
the varied formats employed by Catholic and Protestant conversion nar-
ratives, English accounts of these latter transformations were composed
almost exclusively by Protestant churchmen. An account of a Muslim
convert written by the convert, rather than a preacher, was not printed
until Joseph Pitts’ story of his captivity in Algiers and enforced conver-
sion, A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the
Mahommetans (1704).58 In putting these texts alongside those centred
upon Protestants and Catholics, I demonstrate that shared rhetorical
premises and narrative models were employed across confessional bound-
aries and applied to converts from faiths other than Christianity.59 This
is not to downplay the divergences between Catholic and Protestant
14 A. SHINN

conversion narratives, but rather to highlight how similarities across con-

fession frequently outweigh differences.60 While the majority of believ-
ers from opposing groups are vociferous in their hostility to conversions
towards the ‘wrong’ faith, my argument is that regardless of the early
modern period’s adversarial culture of conversion, converts and their wit-
nesses are reliant upon a common tropology, and a shared understand-
ing of narrative, rooted in both classical learning and the language of the
Bible. Conversion narratives are therefore a powerful instance of rhetor-
ical and religious cultures intersecting across confessions as writers who
think of themselves as violently opposed to one another utilise similar
compositional techniques in order to argue for divergent truths.61
While my perspective is cross-confessional and I examine a significant
number of Catholic conversion accounts printed by continental presses at
Paris, Douai and St. Omer, or clandestinely printed in England, as well
as a range of predominantly Catholic manuscript sources, the majority
of the texts analysed recount stories of Protestant conversion.62 This
reflects the bias embedded in the circulation of religious texts during
this period in England as Catholic writings were in danger of censure
or punishment under Protestant regimes.63 My primary sources are also
dominated by printed works, partly because of their proliferation in the
period. I am not exclusively studying print, however, because as Kathleen
Lynch argues, print provided a powerful ‘fixative’ for religious experi-
ence, particularly during the febrile years of the seventeenth century.64
Print reinforces narrative’s inherent facility for closure and therefore acts
as a supplementary point of termination for the turning convert, but it
is also an agent of the discursive homogenisation which I see developing
in my period of study. One of the concerns of this project is to underline
how converts and their fellow believers often saw individual stories as
powerful exempla that should be widely disseminated in order to bolster
the faithful and catch more souls. A writer’s recourse to the press makes
explicit the proselytising impulse behind their composition of a conver-
sion account due to the medium’s ability to cross geographical and con-
fessional boundaries with relative ease, but this freedom of movement
also potentially inspires imitation and uniformity over time. In order to
remain attuned to the complex and winding nature of the conversion
narrative’s progress towards relative homogeneity, I have placed printed
works alongside manuscript sources, many of which also actively sought
public readership but whose format precluded widespread circulation,
in order to emphasise the comparatively unregimented attitude to the
 1 INTRODUCTION: TALES OF TURNING 15

depiction of conversion prior to the 1650s. Including manuscript sources

has also allowed me to incorporate a greater number of female narratives
than would have been otherwise possible, as before the 1640s female
converts were far less likely to enter the marketplace of print.65
During a period in which identities and cultural practices were being
reformulated after the Reformation, and encounters with other lands and
faith communities, conversion occupied a central position both within
the English consciousness and the English language. Conversion narra-
tives are not only a repository for stories of religious and spiritual trans-
formation, they emphasise the extent to which the actions of reading
and writing are implicated in wider systems of spiritual metamorphosis
and change. They also reveal a complex system of sedimentary narrative
typologies, and provide powerful evidence for a concordance between
turned souls and turned words. In order to explore the complicated and
creative ways in which writers attempt to concretise or reify an other-
wise invisible and silent change in the soul of a convert, I have grouped
my study into four subplots which act as smaller structural components
within the wider conversion masterplot: the convert who reads, the con-
vert who transforms and is transformed by language, the convert who
travels, and the convert whose body acts as a source of proof.
Chapter 2, ‘Take Up and Read: The Convert and the Book’, charts
conversion’s intimate and transformative relationship with reading. I look
firstly at evidence for the various books, scriptural and otherwise, which are
identified by converts as having precipitated their conversion experiences.
In doing so, it becomes clear that a range of believers ascribe a change in
their soul to a change in their reading habits, most notably when charting
a movement away from frivolous books towards scripture and the works
of the Church Fathers. The equation of the successful or virtuous reader
with the successful convert also leads to a number of instances where the
convert advertises their changed status via public acts of reading. Such is
the prevalence of a conversionary reading culture that a number of guides
to conversion are published in the period and I analyse these in order to
isolate some of the persuasive strategies harnessed by their writers. I then
explore the implied utility of conversion texts themselves and their writ-
ers’ construction of an imagined readership. I argue that converts not only
demonstrate an interest in the religious efficacy of different texts, but also
display awareness that their own conversion account could potentially
enact a similar change in the reader. Correspondingly, the writers of con-
version stories often adopt the language of conversation, gift giving and
16 A. SHINN

letter writing in order to create an atmosphere of transferal and exchange.

The chapter also looks in detail at the role played by print in disseminating
stories of conversion and proselytising to the unconverted. In arguing for
conversion’s prominent position within a transformative reading culture, I
provide a context for the active and galvanising potential of the rhetorical
strategies adopted by conversion narratives.
Chapter 3, ‘Converting Souls and Words: Tropes, Eloquence and
Translation’ moves from the reading culture of conversion to consider
in detail the conflation of the rhetorical and spiritual ‘turn’ in both con-
version accounts and rhetoric textbooks. I argue that rhetorical usage in
conversion narratives is part of a systematic construction of the convert
through the wielding of tropes such as simile and metaphor. For example,
in conversion narratives rhetorical tropes are not just linguistic ornaments
but can be imbued with a phenomenological quality, providing directions
and sightlines which help to orientate the convert by inserting them into
pre-existing scripts. The chapter also explores the centrality of religious
language to arguments about the usefulness and validity of rhetorical
forms. This involves a detailed examination of the role played by the elo-
quent convert in securing and perpetuating religious change. I then go
on to look at prevailing, and pervasive, tropes in a variety of conversion
narratives, from the metaphor of the hunt to the convert figured as a lost
sheep returned to the fold. I also consider the importance of the connec-
tion between conversion and translation for those conversion narratives
which are translated into English. I argue that the process of translation,
freighted by the role played by word choice in delineating confessional
boundaries, mirrors the simultaneous metamorphosis and transferal
evinced by conversion. In exploring the rhetorical components employed
when crafting the convert, I excavate connections between literary sys-
tems of figuration and the realisation, and revelation, of religious change.
Chapter 4, ‘Narrative Topographies and the Geographies of
Conversion’, focuses upon the use of the journey trope in conversion
narratives. Rather than looking at allegorical spiritual movement, how-
ever, I explore texts where the journey trope is grounded in recollected
movement through time and space. The conflation of the literal and
figural in this context reflects the early modern understanding of the
environment as an active participant in the battle for souls, whether man-
ifested in dangerous sea crossings, storms which mirror an internal tem-
pest, or the radiating influence of places such as Rome. In addition, I
argue that the language of mapping, navigation and surveying is a cru-
cial tool for converts looking to contain and explicate their religious
 1 INTRODUCTION: TALES OF TURNING 17

experience, resulting in a level of plottable geographical specificity which

means that their journey (both actual and spiritual) can be verified and
replicated. This chapter culminates in a reading of the convert-in-the-
world as an object in continuous motion and therefore the subject of a
narrative which is concerned less with the recollection of religious experi-
ence than the perpetual (re)creation of the convert in the present.
Chapter 5, ‘Witnessing the Body: Corporeal Conversions’, looks at
how the writers of conversion narratives use bodily systems of proof to
provide evidence for an otherwise invisible change in a believer’s spiritual
constitution. Making links with judicial rhetoric and the tradition of the
sacred anatomy, I argue that conversion accounts use the description of
changes in complexion and gesture to indicate the state of the convert’s
soul. In proposing a link between witnessing the body and systems of
proof in conversion narratives, I first consider how the language of proof
permeated early modern society and frequently centred upon the body
as a locus for inartificial proof or proof from experience. I then go on to
address how the gestural movements of the convert’s body are ascribed
to the effects of divine or demonic influence and used to determine
whether a convert belongs to a particular religious community. This is
followed by an analysis of conversion stories which recount extreme bod-
ily behaviours in the form of excessive weeping and the eating of strange
substances. Finally, I briefly consider how the hermeneutic power of
somatic experience occasionally results in converts choreographing their
body’s movements and behaviours in an attempt to substantiate their
conversion or will it into being. Throughout, I argue that the depiction
of the convert’s body within the text promotes a form of virtual witness-
ing on the part of the reader as they ‘see’ the physical manifestation of
religious phenomena through the act of reading.
Taken together, the chapters pay sustained attention to the literary
complexity and inventiveness of conversion accounts composed between
1580 and 1660. At the same time, they identify a number of dominant
narrative typologies, and the rhetorical forms which make up their con-
stitutive parts. Moving between the universal and particular qualities
of conversion narratives in this manner allows me to make connections
between seemingly disparate texts and highlight the shared rhetorical
culture which underpins their composition. By foregrounding a broadly
formalist analysis of the textual products which result from, or engage
with, conversion in this earlier period, my book thereby offers a new per-
spective onto the turnings and (re)turnings which were imaginatively
central to religious experience in early modern England.
18 A. SHINN

Notes
1. Thomas Wilson, A Christian Dictionarie, Opening the Signification of the
Chiefe Wordes Dispersed Generally Through Holie Scriptures of the Old and
New Testament, Tending to Increase Christian Knowledge (London: W.
Iaggard, 1612), F2r.
2. OED, ‘conversion,’ n., def. 1.
3. Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century
England (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2nd ed., 1994), 39.
4. John Heywood, Iohn Heywoodes woorkes. A dialogue conteyning the number
of the effectuall prouerbes in the Englishe tounge, compact in a matter con-
cernynge two maner of maryages (London: Thomas Powell, 1562), Aa3v.
5. Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar
and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 413. Cummings
is here discussing conversion in the context of John Donne’s sermons
and Donne’s repeated insistence that ordinary grammar is incapable of
expressing the ‘grammar of grace’.
6. This is a phenomenon which Nigel Smith identifies as a crucial compo-
nent of the prophetic tenor of radical Protestant conversion narratives
but which this book argues can be seen in both Protestant and Catholic
works, Nigel Smith, Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in
English Radical Religion 1640–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989),
24.
7. Ken Jackson and Arthur F. Marotti, ‘The Turn to Religion in Early
Modern English Studies,’ Criticism 46 (2004), 167–190; Kevin Sharpe,
Remapping Early Modern England: The Culture of Seventeenth-Century
Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 12; Claire
McEachern ‘Introduction,’ in Religion and Culture in Renaissance
England, eds. Claire McEachern and Debora Shuger (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1997), 11–12; and Debora Shuger, Habits
of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant
Culture (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2nd ed., 1997), 6.
8. Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England
1400–1580 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992); Alison Shell,
Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007); Alexandra Walsham, The
Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early
Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)
and Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity, and Confessional Polemic
in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1993);
Arthur F. Marotti, Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and
Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (Notre Dame, IA:
 1 INTRODUCTION: TALES OF TURNING 19

University of Notre Dame Press, 2005); Lucy E. C. Wooding, Rethinking

Catholicism in Reformation England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
Ethan H. Shagan has criticised the ‘meta-narrative of conversion’ often
used to conceptualise the Reformation and endeavoured to excavate
popular—and often more ambiguous—responses to religious change,
Popular Politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2003), 7.
9. Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation; Ceri Sullivan,
Dismembered Rhetoric: English Recusant Writing, 1580–1603 (Madison,
NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995); John N. King, English
Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982); Alison Shell,
Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–
1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Barbara Kiefer
Lewalski, Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979); Nigel Smith, Perfection
Proclaimed; and Robert S. Miola, Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology
of Primary Sources (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
10. E. Natalie Rothman, Brokering Empire: Trans-Imperial Subjects Between
Venice and Istanbul (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011); Eric R.
Dursteler, Renegade Women: Gender, Identity, and Boundaries in the Early
Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2011); Dennis Austin Britton, Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation,
and Early Modern English Romance (New York: Fordham University
Press: 2014); Daniel Vitkus, Turning Turk: English Theatre and the
Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630 (Houndmills, Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2nd ed., 2008) and Three Turk Plays from Early
Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000); Matthew
Dimmock, New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early
Modern England (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005) and Mythologies of the Prophet
Muhammad in Early Modern English Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013); Nabil Matar, Islam in Britain: 1558–1685
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) and ‘“Turning Turk”:
Conversion to Islam in English Renaissance Thought,’ The Durham
University Journal 86 (1994), 33–43. For an examination of the narratives
produced by Islamic converts in the Ottoman Empire see Tijana Krstić,
Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early
Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
11. D. Bruce Hindmarsh, in particular, argues that Bunyan’s Grace
Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (1666) and the Pilgrim’s Progress
(1678) ‘helped to establish the form of the conversion narrative,’
D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual
Another random document with
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of revelation. But again we catch ourselves sermonizing: to the
diagram.
 Fossils from the London Clay.

1. Tellina crassa.
2. Chama squamosa.
3. Turritella imbricataria.
4. Fusus asper.
5. Pleurotoma colon.
6. Murex tubifer.
7. Aporhais pes-pelicani.
8. Voluta luctator (or luctatrix).
9. Trochus monolifer: the necklace trochus.
10. Venericardia cor-avium.
11. Fusus bulbiformis: the bulb fusus.
 These fossils we obtained from the neighbourhood of
Christchurch; and as these sheets were being written, we received
from Dr. Mantell’s “Geological Excursions in the Isle of Wight,” the
following appropriate description of them: “The numerous marine
fossil shells which are obtained from this part of the coast of
Hampshire, are generally known as Hordwell fossils; but it is
scarcely necessary to remark, that they almost entirely belong to the
London clay strata, and are procured from Barton cliffs. These fossils
are most conveniently obtained from the low cliff near Beacon
Bunny, and occur in greatest abundance in the upper part of the dark
green sandy clay. There are generally blocks of the indurated
portions of the strata on the beach, from which fossils may be
extracted. A collection of Hordwell fossils, consisting of the teeth of
several species of sharks and rays, bones of turtles, and a great
variety of shells, may be purchased at a reasonable price of Jane
Webber, dealer in fossils, Barton cliff, near Christchurch.”—(P. 124.)
Before leaving the Eocene, or rather the London clay of the
Eocene, we will give a drawing of a fossil in our possession. The
drawing opposite represents a piece of fossil wood, pierced through
and through by Teredinæ, a boring mollusk allied to the Teredo,
which still proves so destructive to our vessels. Although the wood is
converted into a stony mass, and in some parts covered by calcareous
matter, the same as is found in the septaria, so common in these
beds, to which we shall presently direct attention, still the grain and
woody texture are most distinct. This wood was once probably
floating down what we now call the Thames, when these piercing,
boring mollusks seized hold upon it, penetrated its soft texture, and
lived, moved, and had their being down at the bottom of the river in
their self-constructed chambers. Time rolled on, and the log of wood
is floated upon the shore, and there it lies to harden and to dry; again
the log is drifted away, and, buried in some soft bed of clay, is
preserved from rotting. In process of time it again sees the light; but
now saturated by argillaceous material, and when hardened by the
sun, becomes the petrifaction such as we see it.
 WOOD PERFORATED RY TEREDINA PERSONATA, LONDON
CLAY.

Here let us refer to the septaria, of which we have just spoken; two
specimens lie before us, which we will briefly describe. In one (1) the
clay is in distinct lozenge-shaped masses of a blue colour, while veins
of calcareous spar or crystallized carbonate of lime surround these,
which are capable of a beautiful marble-like polish; in the other (2)
the clay is of the same colour, only in larger proportions, and the
spar is of a deep brown colour, while here and there portions of iron
pyrites may be seen; they become beautiful ornaments in a room
when cut and polished. It should be added, that the septaria are not
without their economic uses, being extensively used as cement after
being stamped and burnt.
 SEPTARIA

Here we may leave this brief sketch of the Eocene, or lowest beds
of the Tertiary. A new creation has been introduced to our view; and
although we still wait for the coming of man—the lord and
interpreter of all—the contemplation of these successive acts and
centres of creation fills our minds with renewed admiration and
reverence of Him for whom, and by whom, and to whom are all
things. Thus “even Geology, while it has exhumed and revivified long
buried worlds, peopled with strange forms in which we can feel little
more than a speculative interest, and compared with which the most
savage dweller in the wilderness of the modern period—jackal,
hyæna, or obscene vulture—is as a cherished pet and bosom friend,
has made for us new bonds of connexion between remote regions of
the earth as it is, on account of which we owe it a proportionate share
of gratitude.”[117]
 No. II.—The Miocene.
We shall briefly pass over this period. At Bordeaux, Piedmont, and
in Lisbon, this formation is seen; as well as in various other parts of
the Continent of Europe. The supposition of Geology is, that during
this period “whole regions of volcanoes burst forth, whose lofty but
now tranquil cones can be seen in Catalonia, in Spain, in France,
Switzerland, Asia, and in America. The Alps, the Carpathian
Mountains, and other lofty ranges were at this period partially
upheaved. The researches of Sir Robert Murchison have established
this fact, by his finding deep beds of limestone, characteristic of the
Tertiary period, on the summit of one of the loftiest of the Alps, fully
ten thousand feet above the level of the sea.”
 No. III.—The Pliocene Period.
This term has already been explained. We shall only detain the
reader by a few words respecting the organic remains that
characterize this formation. In England it is confined to the eastern
part of the county of Suffolk, where it is called “Crag.” This is a mere
provincial name, given particularly to those masses of shelly sand
which are used to fertilize lands deficient in calcareous matter. The
geological name given to this strata is the “Red or Coralline Crag;”
and it is so called on account of the deep ferruginous colour its fossils
have through extensive oxidization of iron. We give drawings of the
fossils of the Red Crag, obtained from the neighbourhood of Ipswich.
 FOSSILS FROM THE RED
CRAG, NEAR IPSWICH.

1. Venericardia senilis.
2. Turritella.
3. Patella æqualis.
4. Cyprea.
5. Paludina lenta.
6. Pectunculus variabilis.
7. Murex.
8. Fusus contrarius.
9. Buccinum elongata.
10. Venericardia scalaris.
11. Voluta lamberti.
12. Fusus asper.
13. Pectunculus pilosus.
 But these are not the only fossils of this period; it is here we meet,
and that for the first time, with the highest form of animal life with
which the researches of geology have made us acquainted. We have
traced life in various forms in the different rocks that have passed
under our rapid survey, and in all we have seen a wondrous and most
orderly gradation. We began with the coral zoophytes, and from
them proceeded to the mollusks and crustacea of the hypogene
rocks; ascending, we discovered “fish with glittering scales,”
associated with the crinoids and cryptogamous plants of the
secondary series of rocks; and then we arrive where we are now,
among the true dicotyledonous and exogenous plants and trees, with
the strange birds and gigantic quadrupeds of the tertiary period. But
the student must not imagine that even the fossils of this epoch bring
him up to the modern era, or the reign of man; for even in the
tertiary system numberless species lived and flourished, which in
their turn became extinct, to be succeeded by others long before
man, the chief of animals and something more, made his
appearance, to hold dominion over these manifold productions of
creative skill and power. But amidst these creations,
“God was everywhere, the God who framed
Mankind to be one mighty human family,
Himself their Father, and the world their home.”

It would be altogether beside the purpose of this preliminary

treatise to enter into any details respecting the animals that have
been found in such abundance in the Norwich Crag, that it has been
called the “Mammaliferous Crag.” Those who desire full and deeply
interesting information on this question should consult Owen’s noble
work, entitled “British Fossil Mammals and Birds,” where, under the
respective divisions of Eocene, Miocene, and Pliocene, he will see a
complete chart of our riches in the possessions of a past creation. For
the discovery of the Siberian Mammoth so often quoted, we shall
refer to the same work, page 217, &c.; from which we shall only quote
one brief extract, illustrative of the abundance of these remains in
our own coasts in the ages past.
“Mr. Woodward, in his ‘Geology of Norfolk,’ supposes that
upwards of two thousand grinders of the mammoth have been
dredged up by the fishermen of the little village of Happisburgh in
the space of thirteen years. The oyster-bed was discovered here in
1820; and during the first twelve months hundreds of the molar
teeth of mammoths were landed in strange association with the
edible mollusca. Great quantities of the bones and tusks of the
mammoth are, doubtless, annually destroyed by the action of the
waves of the sea. Remains of the mammoth are hardly less numerous
in Suffolk, especially in the pleistocene beds along the coast, and at
Stutton;—they become more rare in the fluvio-marine crag at
Southwold and Thorp. The village of Walton, near Harwich, is
famous for the abundance of these fossils, which lie along the base of
the sea-cliffs, mixed with bones of species of horse, ox, and deer.”[118]

SKELETON OF THE MEGATHERIUM CUVIERI

(AMERICANUM).

All the animals of this period are called theroid animals: from
therion, a wild beast; and looking at the skeletons as they have been
arranged from the few existing fossils, or from nearly complete
materials—a matter not of guess-work, but of the most rigid
application of the principles of comparative anatomy—we stand
astounded at the prodigious sizes of these mammoths of the tertiary
era. There is the deinotherium, or fierce wild beast; the
palæotherium, or ancient wild beast; the anoplotherium, or
unarmed wild beast, and others. We give above a drawing of the well-
known megatherium, or great wild beast, to be seen in the British
Museum, and add the following from Mantell’s Guide to the Fossils
of the British Museum:—“This stupendous extinct animal of the sloth
tribe was first made known to European naturalists by a skeleton,
almost entire, dug up in 1789, on the banks of a river in South
America, named the Luxon, about three miles south-east of Buenos
Ayres. The specimen was sent to Madrid, and fixed up in the
Museum, in the form represented in numerous works on natural
history. A second skeleton was exhumed at Lima, in 1795; and of late
years Sir Woodbine Parish, Mr. Darwin, and other naturalists have
sent bones of the megatherium, and other allied genera, to England.
The model of the megatherium has been constructed with great care
from the original bones, in the Wall-cases 9, 10, and in the Hunterian
Museum. The attitude given to the skeleton, with the right arm
clasping a tree, is, of course, hypothetical; and the position of the
hinder toes and feet does not appear to be natural. Altogether,
however, the construction is highly satisfactory; and a better idea of
the colossal proportions of the original is conveyed by this model,
than could otherwise be obtained.”[119]

SKELETON OF THE MASTODON OHIOTICUS, FROM NORTH

AMERICA.
(Height, 9½ feet; length, 20 feet.)

We give below a drawing of the “Mastodon Ohioticus;” for the

following account of which we are indebted to the same source. It
will be found in Room 6, figure 1.—“This fine skeleton was purchased
by the trustees of the British Museum of Albert Koch, a well-known
collector of fossil remains; who had exhibited, in the Egyptian Hall,
Piccadilly, under the name of the Missourium, or Leviathan of the
Missouri, an enormous osteological monster, constructed of the
bones of this skeleton, together with many belonging to other
individuals—the tusks being fixed in their sockets so as to curve
outwards on each side of the head. From this heterogeneous
assemblage of bones, those belonging to the same animal were
selected, and are articulated in their natural juxtaposition.”[120]

FOSSIL HUMAN SKELETON, FROM GUADALOUPE.

(The original 4 feet 2 inches long, by 2
feet wide.)
 PLAN OF THE CLIFF AT GAUDALOUPE.

In Wall-case D of the British Museum, may be seen a fossil

skeleton of a human being, brought from the island of Guadaloupe,
the consideration of which must for ever remove any idea that may
exist about man being contemporaneous with the theroidal
mammals of which we have been speaking.[121] Professor Whewell has
remarked that the “gradation in form between man and other
animals is but a slight and unimportant feature in contemplating the
great subject of the origin of the human race. Even if we had not
revelation to guide us, it would be most unphilosophical to attempt
to trace back the history of man, without taking into account the
most remarkable facts in his nature: the facts of civilization, arts,
government, speech—his traditions—his internal wants—his
intellectual, moral, and religious constitution. If we will attempt a
retrospect, we must look at all these things as evidence of the origin
and end of man’s being; and we do thus comprehend, in one view,
the whole of the argument—it is impossible for us to arrive at an
origin homogeneous with the present order of things. On this
subject, the geologist may, therefore, be well content to close the
volume of the earth’s physical history, and open that divine record
which has for its subject the moral and religious nature of man.”
“Mysterious framework of bone, locked up in the solid marble,—
unwonted prisoner of the rock! an irresistible voice shall yet call thee
out of thy stony matrix. The other organisms, thy partners in the
show, are incarcerated in the lime for ever,—thou but for a term.
How strangely has the destiny of the race to which thou belongest re-
stamped with new meanings the old phenomena of creation!... When
thou wert living, prisoner of the marble, haply as an Indian wife and
mother, ages ere the keel of Columbus had disturbed the waves of the
Atlantic, the high standing of thy species had imparted new
meanings to death and the rainbow. The prismatic arch had become
the bow of the covenant, and death a great sign of the unbending
justice and purity of the Creator, and of the aberration and fall of the
living soul, formed in the Creator’s own image,—reasoning,
responsible man.”[122]

FINIS:—THE GEOLOGIST’S DREAM.

ALARM, BUT NO DANGER.

 CHAPTER XIII.
SCRIPTURE AND GEOLOGY; OR, APPARENT
CONTRADICTIONS RECONCILED.

“By Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and that are in earth,
visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or
principalities, or powers; all things were created by Him, and for Him;
and He is before all things, and by Him all things consist.”—Paul.

We have in the course of the previous volume alluded to certain

discrepancies, supposed to exist between the statements of Scripture,
and the teachings of Geology. We have more than once intimated our
intention of discussing at some length these questions, that have so
long been tabooed by truly religious people, and often needlessly
exaggerated by those who have possessed a “microscopic eye,” in the
discovery of the weak points of Christian faith or opinion. Dropping
the convenient and euphonious form of egotism, which allows
sovereigns and authors to adopt the plural, we shall crave to stand
before our readers in our personal and singular, rather than in our
impersonal and plural, form of speech.

To the reader let me first say, that while I do not wish to appear
before him as an advocate, as if I held a brief or had a retaining fee
on behalf of Moses, I nevertheless feel rather keenly that the
“reverend” put before my name may give something like this aspect
to all my remarks. It may be thought, and that honestly enough, that
because mine is the clerical profession, I am bound, per fas aut
nefas, to contend for the authority of Scripture. It may be thought—
in fact, it is daily alleged against us—that the particular “stand-point”
we occupy is an unfair one, inasmuch as a preacher is bound to “stick
to the Bible;” and indeed that he always comes to it with certain à
priori conclusions, that to a great extent invalidate his reasonings,
and destroy the morality of his arguments.
Possibly there may be more truth in this than any of us dream of:
fas est ab hoste doceri. I therefore make no professions of honesty,
and appeal to no one’s feelings; let us go and look at the Bible, and at
the earth’s crust, and be guided by our independent researches.
Should this happen to be read by any one whose mind is out of joint
with Scripture; who no longer reposes with satisfaction on the old
book of his childhood and his youth; who has begun to fear,—
perhaps to think that it is only a collection of “cunningly devised”
fables; and who is on the verge of giving up Christianity and all “that
sort of thing;” to such an one I shall speak, supposing him to be as
honest in his doubts as I am in my convictions. I cannot deal with
man as if he had no right to doubt; I have never yet “pooh-poohed”
any one’s unbelief; but I have always striven to regard all doubts
expressed in courteous phrase, as the result of investigation, even
though it may be partial, as the fruit of study, although it may have
been misguided, and as the painful conclusions of a thinking mind,
and not cherished for the sake of “having a fling” at moral truth or a
righteous life, or at the mothers and sisters whose life “remote from
public haunt” has saved them from ever doubting the truth of
revelation.
Doubting and scorning are very opposite phases of mind: we here
address the doubter; with the scorner we have nothing to do; if
ridicule is his substitute for argument, by all means let him enjoy it;
and if calling names is his substitute for patient investigation, let
him enjoy that pastime also—hard words break no bones; but for the
doubter, for the man who has his honest difficulties, and finds large
stumbling-blocks in the path of unresisting acquiescence in
household faiths, for such an one I have much to say in this chapter,
if he will read it,—to him I stretch forth my hand in cordial greeting,
and invite him to examine evidence, and consider facts; and then,
whatever may be the result, whether I shake his doubts or he shake
my faith, we shall at least have acted a manly and a straightforward
part. At any rate, we ought ever to meet as friends, and to be candid
and forbearing, as men liable to err through manifold besetments
and biasses.
 Having thus thrown myself upon my reader’s candour, by a clear
avowal of the spirit in which such controversies ought to be
conducted, let us together proceed to the purpose of this chapter.
Between Geology and Scripture interpretation there are apparent
and great contradictions—that all admit: on the very threshold of our
future remarks, let us allow most readily that between the usually
recognised interpretations of Scripture and the well-ascertained facts
of Geological science, there are most appalling contradictions; and
the questions arising thence are very important, both in a scientific
and in a theological point of view. Is there any method of
reconciliation, by which the harmony of the facts of science with the
statements of the Bible can be shown? Where is the real solution to
be found? Are we mistaken in our interpretations, or are we
mistaken in our discoveries? Have we to begin religion again de
novo, or may the Bible and the Book of Nature remain just as we
have been accustomed to regard them; both as equally inspired
books of God, waiting only the service and worship of man, their
priest and interpreter?
These are questions surely of no common importance. Neither the
Christian nor the doubter act a consistent part in ignoring them.
Should the Christian say, “I want no teachings of science: I want no
learned phrases and learned researches to assist me in
understanding my Bible: for aught I care, all the ‘ologies’ in the world
may perish as carnal literature: I know the Book is true, and decline
any controversy with the mere intellectual disputant;” and if the
Christian should go on to add, as probably he would in such a state of
mind, and as, alas! too many have done to the lasting disgust and
alienation of the thoughtful and intelligent: “These are the doubts of
a ‘philosophy falsely so called:’ science has nothing to do with
Revelation: they have separate paths to pursue; let them each go
their own way: and should there come a collision between the two,
we are prepared to give up all science once and for ever, whatever it
may teach, rather than have our views upon Revelation disturbed:”—
now, if the Christian talks like that, he is acting a most unwise part.
He is doing in his limited sphere of influence what the Prussian
Government intended to have done when Strauss’ “Life of Christ”
appeared. It was the heaviest blow that unbelief had ever struck
against Christianity, and the Government of Prussia with several
theological professors were disposed to prosecute its author, and
forbid the sale of the book. But the great Neander deprecated this
course, as calculated to give the work a spurious celebrity, and as
wearing the aspect of a confession that the book was unanswerable.
He advised that it should be met, not by authority, but by argument,
believing that the truth had nothing to fear in such a conflict. His
counsel prevailed, and the event has shown that he was right.
If, on the other hand, the doubter should say, “The intelligence of
the day has outgrown our household faiths; men are no longer to be
held in trammels of weakness and superstition, or to be dragooned
into Religion;—the old story about the Bible, why, you know we can’t
receive that, and look upon those compilations that pass by that
name as divinely inspired Books; we have long since been compelled
to abandon the thought that Christianity has any historic basis, or
that its Books have any claim upon the reverence or faith of the
nineteenth century, as of supernatural origin.”
To such an one I should say, that this begging of the question, this
petitio principii, is no argument; these are statements that require
every one of them a thorough demonstration before they are
admitted; you deny the Christian one single postulate: you deny him
the liberty of taking anything for granted; and then begin yourself
with demanding his assent unquestioned to so large a postulate as
your very first utterance involves, “that the intelligence of the age has
outgrown our household faiths.” Before you proceed you must prove
that; and we must know what is meant by those terms, before we can
stand upon common ground, and hold anything like argument upon
these debated points.
From such general observations let us come to the precise objects
before us: Geology and Scripture are supposed to be at variance
specially on three points. The age of the earth: the introduction of
death: and the Noachian Deluge. These apparent contradictions are
the most prominent difficulties, and cause the most startling doubts
among those who imagine Science to be antagonistic to Christian
revelation. I propose to devote a little attention to each of these
questions, while I endeavour honestly to show how, in my opinion,
apparent contradictions may be reconciled. The questions are these,
to state them in a popular form: 1. Is the world more than 6,000
years old? and if it is, how are the statements of Scripture and
Geology to be reconciled? 2. Was death introduced into the world
before the fall of man? and if it was, how are the truths of Scripture
on this question to be explained? and, 3. What was the character of
the Noachian Deluge? was it partial or universal? and what are the
apparent discrepancies in this case, between science and the Bible?
Perhaps before I proceed a step further I ought to add that, in my
belief, the age of the earth, so far as its material fabric, i.e. its crust, is
concerned, dates back to a period so remote, and so incalculable, that
the epoch of the earth’s creation is wholly unascertained and
unascertainable by our human arithmetic; whether this is
contradicted in the Scripture, is another question.
With regard to the introduction of death, I believe that death upon
a most extensive scale prevailed upon the earth, and in the waters
that are under the earth, ages, yea countless ages, before the creation
of man—before the sin of any human being had been witnessed; that
is what Geology teaches most indisputably: whether the Scriptures
contradict this statement, is another question.
With regard to the Noachian Deluge, I believe that it was quite
partial in its character, and very temporary in its duration; that it
destroyed only those animals that were found in those parts of the
earth then inhabited by man; and that it has not left one single shell,
or fossil, or any drift or other remains that can be traced to its action.
Whether the Scriptures teach any other doctrine, is another question.
By this time the ground between us is narrowed, and I may
probably anticipate that I shall have objections to answer, or
misapprehensions to remove, quite as much on the part of those who
devoutly believe, as on the part of those who honestly doubt the
Christian Scriptures.
First then,
I. How old is the world? How many years is it since it was called
into being, as one of the planets? How many centuries have elapsed
since its first particle of matter was created?
The answer comes from a thousand voices, “How old? why, 6,000
years, and no more, or closely thereabouts! Every child knows that;—
talk about the age of the world at this time of day, when the Bible
clearly reveals it!”
Now I ask, Where does the Bible reveal it? Where is the chapter
and the verse in which its age is recorded? I have read my Bible
somewhat, and feel a deepening reverence for it, but as yet I have
never read that. I see the age of man recorded there; I see the
revelation that says the human species is not much more than 6,000
years old; and geology says this testimony is true, for no remains of
man have been found even in the tertiary system, the latest of all the
geological formations. “The Bible, the writings of Moses,” says Dr.
Chalmers, “do not fix the antiquity of the globe; if they fix any thing
at all, it is only the antiquity of the species.”
It may be said that the Bible does not dogmatically teach this
doctrine of the antiquity of the globe; and we reply, Very true; but
how have we got the idea that the Bible was to teach us all physical
science, as well as theology. Turretin went to the Bible for
Astronomy: Turretin was a distinguished professor of theology in his
day, and has left behind him large proofs of scholarship and piety.
Well, Turretin went to the Bible, determined to find his system of
astronomy in it; and of course he found it. “The sun,” he says, “is not
fixed in the heavens, but moves through the heavens, and is said in
Scripture to rise and to set, and by a miracle to have stood still in the
time of Joshua; if the sun did not move, how could birds, which
often fly off through an hour’s circuit, be able to return to their
nests, for in the mean time the earth would move 450 miles?” And if
it be said in reply, that Scripture speaks according to common
opinion, then says Turretin, “We answer, that the Spirit of God best
understands natural things, and is not the author of any error.”
We smile at such “ecclesiastical drum” noise now, and we can well
afford to do so: but when people go to the Bible, determined to find
there, not a central truth, but the truths of physics, in every
department of natural science, are we to be surprised that they come
away disappointed and angry? As Michaelis says, (quoted by Dr.
Harris, in his “Man Primeval,” p. 12,) “Should a stickler for
Copernicus and the true system of the world carry his zeal so far as to
say, that the city of Berlin sets at such an hour, instead of making
use of the common expression, that the sun sets at Berlin at such an
hour, he speaks the truth, to be sure, but his manner of speaking it is
pedantry.”
Now, this is just the way to make thoughtful men unbelievers: and
we will not adopt that plan, because it is not honest, neither is it