Performing Conversion

Abstract

Brings together diverse scholarship on theatre and conversional practices in early modern Europe and Latin America Makes a compelling argument for the importance of theatrical practices and theatrical thinking in how conversion itself changed for early moderns Discusses a wide range of theatrical practices that include, but are not limited to, established canonical authors Provides new readings of classic plays by Middleton, Lope de Vega, and others Provides a series of case studies of theatre and conversional practice centered around specific cities This volume asks, how did theatrical practice shape the multiplying forms of conversion that emerged in early modern Europe? Each chapter focuses on a specific city or selection of cities, beginning with Venice, then moving to London, Mexico City, Tlaxcalla, Seville, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zürich, Berne, and Lucerne (among others). Collectively, these studies establish a picture of early modernity as an age teeming with both excitement and anxiety over conversional activity. In addition to considering the commercial theater that produced professional dramatists such as Lope de Vega and Thomas Middleton, the volume surveys a wide variety of kinds of theatre that brought theatricality into formative relationship with conversional practice. Examples range from civic pageantry in Piazza San Marco, to mechanical statues in Amsterdam’s pleasure labyrinths, to the dramatic dialogues performed by students of rhetoric in colonial Mexico. As a whole, the volume addresses issues of conversion as it pertains to early modern theatre, literature, theology, philosophy, economics, urban culture, globalism, colonialism, trade, and cross-cultural exchange.