Description
Book SynopsisExamines early modern English literary representations of Jews and Muslims converting to Christianity alongside English translations of Calvin’s writings, polemical writings, treaties on the sacraments, catechisms, and sermons. Demonstrates that the development of a theology of race in post-Reformation England helped resolved doctrinal controversies about baptism.
Trade Review"Above and beyond its substantial contribution to early modern literary studies, Becoming Christian gives the effort of conversion and the work of baptism new meaning and momentum. As such, this book is not only about romance: it also participates in romance, a literary form that draws its extraordinary resilience from its capacity to serve as a tool for living." -Julia Reinhard Lupton, The Spenser Review "Becoming Christian is an exciting study that offers a theological account of race and racialization in early modern England, and explores the way this theology of race informs the cultural imagination." -- -Joan Pong Linton Indiana University "Britton's book serves as a model of intersectional approaches to early modern race, animating connections among skin color, bloodline, faith, and geography...The journey is exhilarating and Britton a remarkably enlightened guide." -- Jean E. Ferrick -Renaissance Quarterly "What is strikingly original in Britton's work is the underlying insistence on unearthing the ways English theologians and writers made use of a religious motif -baptism- as a coded racial marker." -- -Margot Hendricks University of California, Santa Cruz "...this is an important book, showing in no uncertain terms how profoundly the construction of Protestant religious difference impacted England's relations not just with other Europeans, but with the populations across the globe that it would increasingly encounter as a Christian nation in the age of empire." -Barbara Fuchs, SEL: Studies in English Literature "Dennis Britton's excellent Becoming Christian uncovers with rigor, clarity, and breadth a hitherto neglected, protoracialist component to early modern Christianity." -Modern Philology
Table of ContentsList of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Not Turning the Ethiope White 1. "The Baptiz'd Race" 2. Ovidian Baptism in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene 3. Infidel Texts and Errant Sexuality: Translation, Reading, and Conversion in Harington's Orlando Furioso 4. Transformative and Restorative Romance: Re-'turning' Othello and the Location of Christian Identity 5. Reproducing Christians: Salvation, Race, and Gender on the Early Modern English Stage Afterword: A Political Afterlife of a Theology of Race and Conversion Notes Bibliography Index
