“‘To the Defense of my Secret Conscience’: Public Narratives of Conversion and their Dramatic Counterparts.”
Brian C. Lockey
Associate Professor
St. John's University
During the early modern period, one’s confessional
identity was largely determined by one’s participation in what Michael Questier
calls “entourages and networks, often factionally aligned internally, whose
ideological concerns inflected the more basic fact of their blood, kin and
client relationships.” According to this model of early modern religious
identity, an individual’s conscience was circumscribed by ideological concerns,
which were themselves determined by familial and communitarian influences.
Given the individual’s dependence on such networks, it is somewhat surprising
that religious conversions occurred at all, and yet, we find numerous accounts
of prominent, public religious conversions that occurred during this period. My
paper is partly on the transnational aspect of such religious conversions, with
a particular consideration of the genre of letter writing as comprising the
linguistic context within which to understand them. In particular, I examine a
number of inter-related autobiographical accounts, like that of Sir Tobie
Matthew’s travels to Italy and his conversion there, while also considering
those Englishman like Sir Philip Sidney and Anthony Munday who travelled to
Italy and maintained their original confessional identity.
I use such autobiographical accounts of conversions in order to gain insight into a number of dramatic portrayals of religious and non-religious conversion in Merchant of Venice, Cymbeline, and Massinger’s The Renegado. By way of background to such dramatic portrayals of conversion, I show that religious converts tended to move in the same circles or be members of the same larger social networks—religious converts to both Roman Catholicism and Protestantism often experienced more than one conversion during their lifetime and were often related to or were close to other converts. This paper considers such “convert communities,” particularly their involvement in religious disputation, within the context of the communitarian theories of Charles Taylor and Jurgen Habermas concerning the emergence of the secular public sphere. On the one hand, the public account of conversion, whether to Catholicism or to Protestantism, was a paradoxical component of a private reform of the self—what Taylor describes as “building the right inner attitude,” and what Edmund Spenser called in a related context, “fashioning a gentleman.” In this respect, such accounts of conversion constitute a crucial unexamined stage in the development of Western secularism. On the other hand, as I show, we should understand dramatic portrayals of conversion and expressions of conscience as best understood as emerging communally rather than from an individualistic discovery of a spiritual truth.
Bibliography:
Matthew, Sir Tobie. A true historical relation of the conversion of Sir Tobie Matthew to the holy
Catholic faith ... [manuscript], ca. 1640.
Murray, Molly. The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden. New York: Cambridge UP, 2009.
Rodda, Joshua. Public Religious Disputation in England, 1558-1626. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2014.
Questier, Michael. Conversion, Politics and Religion in England 1580-1625. New York: Cambridge UP, 1996.
Brian Lockey teaches Early Modern literature and culture, including Shakespeare. His most recent book, Early Modern Catholics, Royalists, and Cosmopolitans: English Transnationalism and the Christian Commonwealth (Ashgate 2015), looks at how the perspective of 16th-century English Catholic exiles and 17th-century English royalist exiles helped to generate a form of cosmopolitanism that was rooted in, but also transcended, contemporary religious and national identities. In the book, Lockey considers the experiences of English exiles and the influence that they had on writers such as Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, Anthony Munday, Sir John Harington, Sir Richard Fanshawe, John Milton, and Aphra Behn. In addition, Lockey is the author of Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature (Cambridge UP, 2006, Paperback edition 2009), which suggests that early modern fiction played a significant role in the discursive formation of legal imperialism. He has co-edited a special issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, entitled The Spanish Connection: Historical and Literary Perspectives on the Empires, he contributed a chapter on Shakespeare and Empire to the Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare, ed. A. Kinney (Oxford UP, 2011), and he has a chapter on Colonialism and the New World in the forthcoming volume, Edmund Spenser in Context, ed. A. Escobedo (Cambridge UP, 2016). His articles have appeared in English Literary Renaissance, the Journal of the History of Ideas, the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, and in the volume, Representing Imperial Rivalry in the Early Modern Mediterranean, eds. B. Fuchs, E. Weissbourd (Toronto, 2015).
