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CONVERSION NARRATIVES
IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND
Tales of Turning
Abigail Shinn
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-
national representation discusses many kinds of writing, both within and
outside the established canon. The volumes may employ different theo-
retical perspectives, but they share an historical awareness and an interest
in seeing their texts in lively negotiation with their own and successive
cultures.
Conversion Narratives
in Early Modern
England
Tales of Turning
Abigail Shinn
Goldsmiths, University of London
London, UK
This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature
Switzerland AG
The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
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
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
Bibliography 223
Index 245
xi
CHAPTER 1
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
[…] 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
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
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