Year: 2018
Type: article
Abstract: This collection of essays emerged from the international "Early Modern Conversions Project," funded by Canada's Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council and administered by McGill University's Institute for the Public Life of Arts and Ideas. 1 Duke is one of eighteen participating institutions from Canada, the U.S., Australia, and England working together toward a rethinking of early modern Europe as an "age of conversion."The Conversions project has aimed to develop historical understandings that will enlighten modern debates about spiritual, psychological, political, corporeal, and sexual kinds of transformation.For our part, we invited a group of distinguished scholars to explore together issues around the topic of "conversion" in medieval and early modern culture.Each scholar came to Duke, beginning in the fall of 2014, to give a keynote lecture in our "Conversions Lecture Series," which ran through the spring of 2016.Making use of the vigorous response and discussion afforded by engaged audiences, the contributors submitted revised essays to JMEMS.In its most basic sense, the term conversion (Latin conversio) signifies a reversal, a change of direction.Yet the change or turnaround that is conversion has meant many different things in different cultures and across a wide range of discourses from logic to lyric poetry, theology to politics.While no one, for example, is born a Christian in the European early Middle Ages, conversion indicated the entry into a specific form of Christian life: monastic orders.It was also a decisive term in the cultivation and defense of that powerful medieval tradition of the Eucharist known as transubstantiation.The call to conversion was central both to medieval movements of reform within Christendom and to the rhetoric and politics of the crusades that ventured outside it.In the sixteenth-and seventeenth-century European reformations, reformers' zeal often sprang from a decisive event or set of events in their own lives, a conversion that, they insisted, revealed divine
Authors: David Aers, Sarah Beckwith
Institution: Duke University
Language: English
Subfield: Classics
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4245220045