Conversion Machines is a brave new world of innovative, interdisciplinary and adventurous thinking about the culture of early modern conversions: its history as well as its transformative impact on body and soul, mind and matter, politics and poetics. This inclusive collaboration will appeal not only to scholars of early modern culture across media and disciplines, but to anyone who wants to take from the past to imagine a collective future.
- Subha Mukherji, University of Cambridge,
Conversion machines are apparatuses, artfully-fashioned preparations, arrangements and things that demonstrate processes of change. They are paradoxical at once intent on verifying what was invisible, uncertain and even unknowable, while also acting as sowers of dissimulation.
This study does not seek to mechanise conversion. In many ways, conversion and the transformation of the convert will remain ineffable. Instead, this collection maintains that conversion of all kinds must unfold in ecologies that include politics, law, religious practice, the arts and the material and corporeal realms. Shifting the focus from subjectivity toward the operations of governments, institutions, artifices and the body, contributors consider how early modern Europeans suffered under the mechanisms of conversion, how they were sometimes able to realise themselves by dint of being caught up in the machinery of sovereignty, how they invented scores of new, purpose-built conversional instruments and how they experienced forms of radical transformation in their own bodies.
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Examines how mechanisms of change and conversions harrowed and transformed early modern people and their worlds.
1. Introduction, Paul Yachnin and Bronwen Wilson
2. The Conversional Politics of Compliance: Oaths and Autonomy in Henrician England, Peter Marshall
3. The Sepulchre Group: A Site of Artistic, Religious, and Cultural Conversion, Ivana Vranic
4. Stony Bundles and Precious Wrappings: The Making of Patio Crosses in Sixteenth-Century New Spain, Anthony Meyer
5. The Conversion of the Built Environment: Classical Architecture and Urbanism as a Form of Colonization in Viceregal Mexico, Juan Luis Burke
6. Material and Spiritual Conversions: Jacopo Ligozzi and the Descrizione del Sacro Monte della Vernia (1612), Bronwen Wilson
7. ‘Haeretici typus, et description’: Heretical and Anti-Heretical Image-Making in Jan David S.J.’s Veridicus Christianus, Walter Melion
8. Disorientation as a Conversion Machine in The Island of Hermaphrodites (1605), Kathleen Long
9. Dynamic Conversions: Grief and Joy in George Herbert’s Musical Verse, Anna Lewton-Brain
10. Theatres of Machines and Theatres of Cruelty: Instruments of Conversion on the Early Modern Stage, Yelda Nasifoglu
11. Body or Soul: Proving Your Religion in the Early Modern Mediterranean, Eric Dursteler
12. What Machines Cannot Do: A Leibnizian Animadversion, Justin Smith
13. Human Conversion Machines: Hamlet and Others, Paul Yachnin.
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Brings forward the history of made things and the history of practices as a new way of understanding the social and political dimensions of early modern conversion (mostly religious conversion but also bodily, sexual, and machine-to-human kinds of transformation)
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Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9781399516013
Publisert
2025-02-28
Utgiver
Edinburgh University Press; Edinburgh University Press
Høyde
234 mm
Bredde
156 mm
Aldersnivå
UP, 05
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Heftet