Conversion Narratives Research Articles

Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 by Rachel Adcock

Reviewed by: Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 by Rachel Adcock Kathleen Lynch BAPTIST WOMEN’S WRITINGS IN REVOLUTIONARY CULTURE, 1640-1680, by Rachel Adcock. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015. 232 pp. $112.00 cloth; $54.95 ebook. Rachel Adcock’s contribution to the burgeoning studies of early modern Englishwomen’s writings restores the voice of Baptist women, a group she claims has been somewhat neglected in favor of critical attention to Quaker women. Baptist Women’s Writings in Revolutionary Culture, 1640-1680 persuasively argues that Baptist women as a group had a particular cultural burden to bear; they struggled to maintain autonomy and independence against the larger patriarchal society that disparaged them for the church alliances they formed—often independent of their husbands—while at the same time they confronted gendered constraints within the church, where their leadership roles could become limited as the congregations they helped establish strengthened. Adcock examines how women managed to articulate their agency in speech and writing despite these burdens. In her book, Adcock addresses a number of individual authors, who were inevitably under pressure in a range of local circumstances. These women included Agnes Beaumont, Deborah Huish, Sara Jones, Susanna Parr, Elizabeth Poole, Katherine Sutton, Anna Trapnel, Jane Turner, and Anne Wentworth. Chapter one takes up the vituperative literature—and visual imagery—directed against Baptist women in popular pamphlets. The title page of Bloody Newes from Dover. Being a True Relation of the Great and Bloudy Murder, Committed by Mary Champion (an Anabaptist) (1647), for instance, has a woodcut showing Mary Champion cutting off her child’s head rather than having the child baptized by her “Presbyterian” husband (pp. 37-41). This cruelty, presented as a “True” report, was part of partisan campaigns to distance Baptists from the body of legitimate religious reformers. Adcock examines the circulation of such pamphlets as indicative of the intense and sustained gossip and disparagement directed against Baptist women, which isolated them from their neighbors and even from their congregations. The first case Adcock turns to, that of Agnes Beaumont, is also one of the later examples in chronological terms. Adcock argues that neighborly suspicions against Beaumont were activated by the decades-long building up of stereotypes that cast her as “wanton” and cautions that [End Page 219] Beaumont’s self-defense should not necessarily be read in personal terms. Adcock also analyzes a striking dream reported by Beaumont in which she could not upright a tree toppled by a storm. Adcock illuminates the scriptural allusions to Isaiah 2, which prophesizes the humbling of all the proud, including the overturning of “all the cedars of Lebanon” and “all the oaks of Bashan” (p. 64). This imagery, employed by Anna Trapnel as well, provides an opening for Adcock to address the display of prophetic gifts as a source of power for these women, who wrote to “show that they were divine instruments rather than mad, whorish, rebellious, or heretical” (p. 27). Chapter two teases out women’s practices against congregational policies as tensions arose and as cultural assumptions that women would be submissive to men surfaced. Adcock explores women’s use of the biblical example of the Hebrew judge Deborah, who spoke from a place of leadership and authority to warn the Israelites against their continued evil behavior. Adcock examines Dorothy Hazzard as a valiant Deborah who cofounded the influential Broadmead Church in Bristol and led the barricading of the city gates against a Royalist siege in 1643. Adcock contextualizes the debate on whether such women were permitted to speak in church by referencing Paul’s contradictory teaching in the New Testament and Susanna Parr’s vociferous defense of her decision to leave her congregation in protest of women’s voices being silenced. Chapters three and four continue to explore women’s contributions to Baptist culture, emphasizing their authority of maternal care for the church. Adcock focuses on women’s use of the quasi-sanctioned genres of prophecy and conversion narrative. Her clear reading of the networks among ministers and members of the book trade support her presentation of Jane Turner as a strong, international spokeswoman for the church...

Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817–1906 by Ellie Schainkar

Reviewed by: Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817–1906 by Ellie Schainkar Glenn Dynner Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817–1906 By Ellie Schainkar. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017. 327 Pp. The popular image of the East European shtetl as an insular, authentic Jewish space is now frequently contested by historians, who tend to regard these heavily Jewish small market towns as scenes of inter-ethnic economic symbiosis and modest social interaction. While this multiconfessional dynamic usually occurred within heavily prescribed roles, boundary transgressions did occur and could result in conversion. In fact, as Ellie Schainker shows in her well-crafted study, conversions occurred a lot more often in the nineteenth-century imperial Russian shtetl than we might expect. These drastic acts were less a result of state pressure or missionary activity, she argues, than of positive dayto-day Jewish-Christian encounters. The Russian Jewish conversion phenomenon, which approached 85,000 by the end of that century, reveals the shtetl as more of an "interreligious zone" than a space of "imagined Jewish exclusivity and social insularity." The older, lachrymose reading of Jewish history tends to treat conversion as a product of state compulsion (military conscription, state-sponsored missionary schemes) and Jewish desperation (poverty, discrimination, anti-Jewish violence). While these could be factors, Schainkar allows, it is time to move beyond solely negative explanations. For one thing, nineteenth-century Russian state conversionist aspirations always existed in tension with the state's legally affirmed toleration of Judaism—officials were much more alarmed by Jewish Christianizing sects and Christian Judaizing sects that defied classification and regulation than by Judaism itself. This contradictory official desire for Jewish conversion alongside official toleration resulted in a relatively passive state missionary project that was, for the most part, kept alive by former Jews. In Russia, proselytizing was largely a "Jewish affair," Schainkar observes. If conversion did not usually emanate from above, it is better examined at the grassroots level. Schainkar presents numerous conversion cases preserved in Russian church and state archives, paying close attention to the "space in which Jews and Christians met and interconfessional relationships were nurtured," [End Page 133] that is, the Jewish-run tavern. Jewish-Christian interactions in Russian taverns were, at base, economic—Jews leased the taverns from nobles and primarily sold vodka to the peasants. Yet Schainkar's sources also suggest interconfessional socializing and occasional theological discussions in taverns, which led some Jews to have a change of heart. Conversion was thus more often an outgrowth of friendship and romance ("shtetl interfaith sociability") than hostile state compulsion. Nor were female conversions frequently a result of male Christian "abductions," as converts' family members often claimed. When abductions did occur they were, in fact, usually at the hands of Jewish families attempting to return converted children to the Jewish community. Images of those abductions, portrayed as fanatical Jewish responses to conversion, proliferated in the Russian press during the late nineteenth century. Schainkar's colorful archival journey represents the kind of work that is transforming historians' understanding of East European Jewry. She unearths myriad cases in a complex interreligious zone while helping us to see larger patterns and tendencies. However, a few areas seem to require further exploration. The profound impact of state-imposed initiatives like Jewish conscription and peasant emancipation on traditional societal constraints seems often missed here. In addition, the main sources selected for analysis—conversion narratives—tend to evince empathy for the converts, who claimed to be only following their hearts, but not for their families, who could be hurt in unseen ways (e.g., damaged marriage prospects for a convert's siblings and cousins). A related issue is the rather generous interpretations of these tendentious sources. Could not many conversion narratives in fact entail exaggerated or fabricated responses designed to please the church and state officials conducting the interviews? Jews who really converted as a result of impoverishment, indebtedness, greed, or careerism would not have been so forthcoming. Nevertheless, Schainkar's book offers fascinating details, new dimensions, and refreshing perspectives on daily Jewish life in imperial Russia. Her approach to the phenomenon of Jewish conversion humanizes individuals who are usually depicted...

“along a road that may lead nowhere”: J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and the Postsecular Novel

And call us?--but too late ye come! Too late for us your call ye blow, Whose bent was taken long ago. --Matthew Arnold, Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, 1855 But to us modern folk it no longer given to catch a glimpse of them, much less suffer their love. 'We come too late.' --J. M. Coetzee, Elizabeth Costello, 2003 There always something unmotivated about conversion experiences, writes J. M. Coetzee; the sins and shortcomings of a past life only become visible through hindsight, when the penitent's eyes have been opened (Marquez 263). Augustine's Confessions (397-400) inaugurated that retrospective quality, giving birth to autobiography and perhaps the form of the novel. Reviewing the English translation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Memoria de mis putas tristes [Memories of My Melancholy Whores] (2004), Coetzee offers an outline of confession, beginning with Augustine--the story of a squandered life culminating in an inner crisis and a conversion experience, followed by spiritual rebirth into a new and richer existence (259). [B]ehold how through the mysterious agency of the Holy Spirit, summarizes Coetzee, even so worthless a being as I can be saved (259). Yet, he thinks, there came a distinctly modern point in the development of the form, where the novel sundered its ties with Augustine: there a degree of in built incompatibility between the conversion narrative and the modem novel, as perfected in the eighteenth century, with its emphasis on rather than on soul and its brief to show by step, without wild leaps and supernatural interventions, how the one who used to be called the hero or heroine but i now more appropriately called the central travels his or her from beginning to end. (263) Coetzee's description likely informed by Ian Watt's The Rise of the Novel (1957), which sees the form as part of a larger process of secularization, the decline of religious belief and authority in public and private life. For Coetzee, the novel most clearly assumes its secular form in its eighteenth-century iterations, turning, as he reads it, to character not soul, to the contingency of the by step rather than the deus ex machina, to the linear plot of a character's road from beginning to (263). We contemporary readers, he suggests, balk at a sudden moment of insight, of conversion, as when Marquez's old suddenly falls in love with the too-young Delgadina. harder to accept for readers of a secular bent, since it has no apparent psychological basis, Coetzee writes, is that the mere spectacle of a naked girl can cause a spiritual somersault in a depraved old man (264). Coetzee's fictions consistently resist such seemingly religious conversions, which have their clearest literary form in the modernist moments of James Joyce's epiphanies. Coetzee's fictions often question instead whether any lesson has been learned at all. To the last we will have learned nothing, the magistrate declares in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) (143). At the end of Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K (1983), K reflects on what might be the of his story, if moral there is: Is that how morals come, in the course of events, when you least expect them? (183). What, we might ask, has David Lurie learned at the end of Disgrace (1999), giving up the dog in his care (220)? Though Elizabeth Costello (2003) structured as eight Lessons, what lessons have been taught to its eponymous protagonist, who thinks, A curse on literature! (225)? Lurie likewise ponders Bev Shaw: Animals trust her, and she uses that trust to liquidate them. What the lesson there? (210). Coetzee's novels show that divine and human calls offer neither simple guidance nor direction, but often lead to profound disorientation. Yet, rather than commit to atheism or nihilism, Coetzee interrogates what remains of ethics and subjectivity in the fragmented ruins of western philosophy, particularly the post-Christian condition--Post-Christian, posthistorical, postliterate, thinks Lurie when lecturing undergraduates (32). …

Patina: A Profane Archaeology by Shannon Lee Dawdy

Reviewed by: Patina: A Profane Archaeology by Shannon Lee Dawdy Haidy Geismar Shannon Lee Dawdy, Patina: A Profane Archaeology. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016. 216 pp. Patina is a material layer that accrues over time on the surface of an object, congealing social values and a sense of the past. For many of the inhabitants of New Orleans, patina has come to signify both the emergence and submergence of the past in the present. As Shannon Lee Dawdy eloquently describes in this slim volume, patina indicates the lived experience of New Orleans space–time, a place where history lies on the surface creating economies of value, forging identities in place, as well as presenting and embodying moments of rupture and transition. From the surface of old wooden heirlooms through to the high water marks left on walls around the city by the flood surges of Hurricane Katrina, patina has become a vehicle through which people understand their relationships to the past and to place, and create new forms of value around them. Dawdy theorizes patina as a form of "critical nostalgia," "not only a political aesthetic but a political force flowing through alternative circuits of value that are both moral and material" (7). Drawing on Benjamin's concept of "profane illumination," Dawdy couches her study as a "profane archaeology": one which highlights "the profoundly muddled relations between objects and subjects, in both psychoanalytic and Marxian terms…a way of understanding everyday objects that takes into account their shifting meanings over time and the way in which they can suddenly activate currents from the past that alter the present" (9). The book draws on three research modalities: Dawdy's many excavations across the heart of colonial New Orleans, the archival research that accompanied them, and a series of interviews with contemporary New Orleanians from across the city. We meet Isaiah, an African American [End Page 543] displaced by Katrina; Joe, a Creole now living on the East Coast; Agatha, an artist living in a historic Center Hall house. These conversational narratives co-produce Dawdy's definition of patina, although it certainly helps that many of her interlocutors are invested in activities that might be seen as parallel to Dawdy's own research: local historic preservation, antiques collecting, and tourism. Throughout the book, Dawdy presents snippets of conversations that patinate her own research. They discuss the idea of antiquity, the persistent fascination with all things "French," the significance of New Orleans as a space committed to the simultaneous commoditization of the past and the production of an affective nostalgia that bodily locates the citizen within a space–time that always moves beyond the present. It becomes clear that this affective nostalgia was a crucial survival tool after Hurricane Katrina. Indeed, even though Dawdy focuses primarily on New Orleans' colonial history, Katrina is at the heart of the book, present in every chapter, in nearly every conversation. The focus of Dawdy's interlocutors on salvage, patina, inheritance, and history implicitly signals a way of domesticating Katrina, insisting on the local in the face of national betrayal, international scrutiny, and new forms of gentrification. The book's chapters explore different narrative tropes that emerge in relation to New Orlean's material past. The introductory chapter introduces the framework of patina, critical nostalgia, and the backdrop of Katrina. Chapter 2 describes how ruins and archaeological sensibilities use the aesthetic and experience of patina to create a sense of heterogeneous time in which the past and the present blur and blend in the continual production and construction of the old. Chapter 3, "A Haunted House Society," focuses on local narratives around ghosts as a discursive patina in which people understand the past to materially remain in their environment. Chapter 4, "French Things," examines the production and consumption of all things French in New Orleans, emphasizing the entanglement of sexuality, otherness, and antiquity in the ways in which faience rouge pots, perfume, French wine, and bordellos have been marketed and continue to inflect the definition of the French Quarter and of New Orleans as a French place. Chapter 5, "The Antique Fetish," explores different theories of the fetish with regard to New Orleanian relations with old things...

Dreaming Converts in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Philip Dandulo and Thomas Warmstry's The Baptized Turk

This article focuses on a dream embedded within a description of the conversion and baptism of a Muslim man in London in 1657. The Baptized Turk (1658), written by the royalist Thomas Warmstry, tells the story of Rigep Dandulo, a twenty-four-year-old from Smyrna who was baptised by Dr. Peter Gunning at Exeter House chapel. In The Baptized Turk , Warmstry describes and analyzes an elaborate dream experienced by Dandulo and also provides his readers with an extensive guide to dream interpretation. Dream accounts appear frequently in mid-seventeenth-century radical Protestant conversion narratives, but Warmstry makes a case for the role of dreaming in substantiating the converting power of moderate Protestantism. This frames the narrative as a riposte to the gathered churches' dreaming converts, and demonstrates the extent to which royalists utilized and transformed the discursive strategies of their religious and political rivals when promoting their own agenda.

Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic by Stefan M. Wheelock

Reviewed by: Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic by Stefan M. Wheelock Jerrilyn McGregory (bio) Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic Stefan M. Wheelock Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press 2016 216 pp. In the field of early Atlantic studies, Stefan Wheelock identifies a scholarly absence due to a dependency that embraced an “elite, white antislavery version of progress” (x). Rightly so, Wheelock focuses on the “charter generation” of black antislavery intellectuals: Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, James Albert Gronniosaw, David Walker, and Maria Stewart. Despite the recent proliferation of early Black Atlantic studies that engage a polycentric approach to the literature, beyond the usual antislavery notables, this study offers a corrective by privileging solely writers who contributed to American Revolution−era intellectual historiography. Wheelock does not mince his words in trumpeting their heuristic rhetoric, which addressed the emergence of a barbaric slaveholding culture that endorsed “commercial decadence” (1). The designated black writers deploy explicit representations to critique race slavery and to characterize “how slaveholding warped Anglo cultural practices of civility” (8). Wheelock’s major concern is that his authorial assemblage of black antislavery intellectuals appears to be arbitrary, lacking a “seamless historical arc” (4). However, this grouping suits his argument that opposes heroic vindicationism—an “emphasis on the heroism of black antislavery texts” (16)—by venturing beyond identity politics and political ideology. Unfortunately, in doing so, Wheelock scapegoats the rise of the multidisciplinary African American studies programs and the “generation of scholars” they wrought (17). This hermeneutic direction portends an unnecessary move in order to advance Wheelock’s own otherwise impressive discursive analysis. The first chapter presents Ottobah Cugoano, who criticized modern Atlantic barbarism and the decay of “ethical religion” (25). Wheelock positions Cugoano as foremost in decrying slaveholders’ attempt to justify race slavery as an economic initiative by situating it as God’s sacred purpose. Eighteenth-century author Edward Long, considered a preeminent historian, published the History of Jamaica in 1774, which Wheelock labels “a decidedly bold proslavery manifesto” that inaugurates the tone for vitriolic racism (37). Long regarded enslaved Africans as subhuman based on skin [End Page 246] pigmentation. Wheelock demonstrates how Cugoano essentially destabilized an argument that emphasizes black skin as evidence of God’s damnation through the use of inversion, resulting in the slaveholders becoming the “historical heirs to God’s damnation” (40). Wheelock recognizes that although Cugoano could not transcend the racial demarcations of his historical moment, ultimately, Cugoano undertook the strategy of equating commercial slavery with barbarism that signifies the descent of European civilization into savagery, and then issued a call for its immediate abolition. Although Cuguano was able to sustain this novel abolitionist argument, Wheelock concedes another of his proposals—the civilizing of Africa—to be problematic but also, with alterity, capable of conveying “the promise of a higher religious sensibility” (57). This chapter’s interrogation of a little-known African natural rights philosopher, indeed, introduces the advent of black intellectual history. Chapter 2 offers a complex reading of Atlantic barbarism via the memoirs of the more renowned black abolitionists Gronniosaw and Equiano. The author does not proffer a comparative analysis of the two narrators but utilizes them to express a broader, more nuanced consideration of slavery “as a redemptive enterprise for blacks” (59). Wheelock speaks to the role of cultural catechism in this indoctrination and how the enslaved processed Christian theology differently than in the intentionality and design of their European missionaries and masters. They were more adept than their “polemical counterparts” in granting themselves agency to manipulate their conversion narratives of the “fortunate fall” into a rhetoric that relied on religious motifs to undermine the institutionalization of slavery (67). Accordingly, the author contextualizes Gronniosaw’s narrative account as a “Black Pilgrim’s Progress,” journeying less allegorically and more realistically to a fall into the tragic world of enslavement and, postemancipation, a life of pilgrimage as an impoverished exile. Then, Wheelock investigates Equiano’s body of writings, including letters, memoir, and other communications, which reveal “the cultural perversions of slavery” (84). The author further delineates the British political writings concurrent with Equiano’s abolitionist awakening and his developing ideology...

The Narrative of the Good Death: The Evangelical Deathbed in Victorian England

In one of his Parochial and Plain Sermons, John Henry Newman reminded his congregation that ‘Life is short; death is certain; and the world to come is everlasting.’ Although Newman in fact lived to a ripe old age, the Victorian experience of death was alarming and unpredictable in the face of wasting diseases, epidemics, the risks of childbirth, industrial accidents, and the uncertainties of medical science. Death provided plenty of material for reflection, and it was a staple theme of preaching and religious literature. In this imaginative and thought-provoking study, Mary Riso uses the obituaries published in the monthly magazines of four evangelical denominations—Wesleyan Methodists, Primitive Methodists, Congregationalists, and Baptists—to track beliefs, attitudes, and social aspirations in the middle years of the nineteenth century. She takes 300 obituaries from each denomination, spread across the 1830s, 1850s, and 1870s, and draws on them to explore theology, social background, the influence of Romanticism, and the last words and experiences of the dying. The chronological sweep enables comparisons across the period, both within and between denominations. Thematic chapters address the major topics of Nonconformist death, obituaries as literature, theology, social mobility, denominational variations, the ‘Romantic Spirit’, last words, and the ‘good death’, and a detailed appendix tabulates obituary content by thirty-nine categories of reference, from theological emphases to lifestyle. Close analysis of the obituaries is linked to broader discussions of Victorian religion, society, and culture, and to older traditions of Christian reflection on mortality in the literature of the ars moriendi.Riso discerns a common shape to the obituaries, a basic fourfold narrative pattern of early life, conversion, subsequent activities, and final illness and death. Emphases varied across the years and across the denominations. The general pattern of development detected here seems to have been a gradual decline in dramatic conversion narratives, a growing attention to or willingness to mention professional or vocational successes, a sense of heaven as a place of continued relationship and service, and an increasing proportion of male (and ministerial) obituaries with the passing decades. These trends, however, were manifest in quite different ways in the different denominations. Riso finds the Congregationalists to be the most professional and the most prosperous, while the Primitive Methodists resisted respectability well into the 1870s. Wesleyans, although increasingly well-to-do, retained a vivid spiritual vocabulary, a commitment to entire sanctification, and a much more equal gender balance than the representatives of Old Dissent.By happy coincidence, one character identified in Riso's sample decade of the 1850s was Samuel Budgett (1794–1851), Wesleyan Methodist founder of a highly successful wholesale grocery business, and subject of a substantial and controversial memoir by William Arthur, The Successful Merchant: Sketches of the Life of Mr Samuel Budgett (1852). This reviewer was prompted to reflect on the relationship between the obituaries published in the denominational magazines and other extant biographical material, whether funeral sermons and tributes reported in the religious press or full-length books, or, in the case of Methodist ministers, in the officially sanctioned obituaries in the Minutes of Conference. Each was subject to a process of selection, drafting, submission, and editing, but the outcomes seem to have varied considerably. It would be interesting to see some more case studies of the similarities and differences, in content, style, and purpose, between the particular genre of the magazine obituary and memorials shaped for other publications. It would also be illuminating to have some sense of whether Evangelicals in the Church of England (or, indeed, Christians of other theological persuasions) adopted similar or different conventions of memorialization.Dr Riso has read widely in the sources and historiography of nineteenth-century religion, as well as in the various denominational magazines, and she is to be congratulated on a stimulating study which sheds light on the beliefs and values of a significant segment of mid-Victorian society, and which will, no doubt, prompt further investigation and lively debate. This is a worthy and welcome addition to Ashgate's Methodist Studies Series.

John Eliot and the Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay: Communities and Connections in Puritan New England by Kathryn N. Gray

AmericanJohn Eliot and Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay: Communities and Connections in Puritan New England. By Kathryn N. Gray. (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press. Co-published with The Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc., Lanham, MD. 2013. Pp. xix, 171. $70.00. ISBN 978-1-61148503-5.)Kathryn N. Gray's John Eliot and Praying Indians of Massachusetts Bay focuses on a small number of books, letters, and pamphlets written by John Eliot and his fellow missionaries in seventeenth-century New England. The texts include Eliot's Algonquian translation of Bible and his Indian Dialogues, a set of imaginary conversations between Puritan ministers and Indian leaders that were, as Eliot said, historical . . . and partly instructive to show what might or should have been said (quoted in Gray, p. 46). Gray also discusses various occasional pieces by Eliot and others, including eleven multi-authored reports known collectively as the Eliot Tracts. The tracts described progress on missionary front, offered detailed accounts of Indian conversions, and solicited funding from potential supporters back home.Though much shorter and less comprehensive than massive records of Catholic priests in New France and New Spain, works discussed by Gray constitute most substantive account of Puritan missionary work in New England through first century of settlement. As such, they have long served historians as a primary source for British attitudes toward native people they encountered. In addition, despite their thoroughly conventional and obviously Euro-centric nature, these accounts also provide detailed and often surprisingly intimate glimpses of indigenous people across irremediable differences between two cultures.Historians have long been interested in Puritan missionary project and native people whom it engaged. There is a large body of contemporary work on those topics, ranging from Alden Vaughan's New England Frontier: Puritans and Indians, 1620-1675 (1965), to Richard W. Cogley's John Eliot's Mission to Indians Before King Philip's War (1999), which is best study of John Eliot's missionary career in its theological and historical contexts. Readers familiar with that historical corpus will find little new in Gray's book. Nevertheless, her work contributes significantly to more recent interest in rhetorical and discursive properties of colonial writing, especially generic innovations associated with literature of contact and their role in symbolic construction of cultural identity.The first two chapters of Gray's book focus on Eliot's use of personal correspondence to solicit financial support for his missionary project, and on broader network of readers established through circulation of Eliot tracts. The remaining three chapters focus on less predictable elements of discursive communities constituted by other books and letters associated with that project. First Gray analyzes physical spaces that support conversion narratives reported by English missionaries-varying from wigwams, campsites, homes and churches, to Harvard's Indian College. Then she turns to inhabitants of those spaces whose voices were subordinated to dominant discourse: colonial women and their Indian counterparts, and native converts known as Praying Indians.Gray's attention to physical sites of discursive interactions is most distinctive feature of her work. Otherwise, her claims often resemble those of other literary historians and cultural theorists who have written on early America, including Mary Louise Pratt, Thomas Scanlan, Hilary Wyss, and Kristina Bross among many others. …

“What the hell was in that wine?”

We consider a corpus of conversational narratives which arise in the complex, multiparty setting of pre- and post-game stretching sessions of a women’s elite basketball team. Our focus is on the characteristics of story openings within this corpus, and we consider how stories are launched; how roles of story opener and teller are distributed within the group, reflecting both entitlement to tell stories and social relationships between the participants; and what strategies are used to introduce different kinds of stories into the interaction. We suggest that the team from which the stories derive represents a modern-day ‘society of intimates’, and show that patterns of story opening and telling reflect this — and correlate with institutional and social roles and relationships.

Linguistic cues for recipient design in an Indigenous Australian conversational narrative

This article presents an examination of some of the linguistic and interactional features of a story emerging from talk in a remote Indigenous Australian community. In the data used here, the storyteller is an elderly Garrwa woman in Borroloola who speaks Garrwa and Kriol. The focus is on how the addition of a non-community member to the field of interaction affected the way the storyteller recounted events from a situation within the previous 24 hours. This is seen not only in what events are told, but also how the teller tailored her story to her audience in the context of telling — a recognition that stories are interactively achieved. Here I examine how she accommodated the knowledge states of her audience, how recipients responded and how this in turn affected the trajectory of the storytelling.

Trapped in a moral order

This paper focuses on the forms of reflexivity that emerge in the conversational narratives of Latin American teenage school girls co-produced during sociolinguistic interviews, in a multicultural school in the centre of Madrid. The narratives about confrontation at school portray the girls’ actions and ways of making sense of such behaviours, in the course of their migrant life trajectories. Understanding narratives as communicative repertoires (Rymes 2014) of an interactive and situated nature makes them suitable discursive spaces for revealing the moral identity constructed, and the moral order evoked in these narratives. Herein we analyse stories recounting conflicts with three different groups of opponents: female peers, teachers and parents. It is in recounting and evaluating moments of conflict that social actors call upon their systems of beliefs and values. The failure of the girls’ secondary school and all the negative repercussions of such failure are central to the ethnographic circumstances in which their narratives are produced. Some attention will be given to the researcher’s reflexivity, as a co-teller of the narratives gathered, but also in the interpretations made of the data in the light of expectations built up over time regarding the social actors’ academic trajectories.

Construction of Illocutionary Speech Meaning: Analyses of Conversational Narratives of a Chinese 60-year-old Woman

This case study centres to focus on 4 recording transcriptions as the main data from an outside-in perspective, to aim to analyze the different illocutionary forces expressed by a 60-year-old Chinese woman; thus, to seek whether there are any illocutionary differences between familiar people and strangers conveyed from her stories. Although some research has been done on Chinese speakers’ categorization of speech acts, narrative and cognitive activities in conversational storytelling, and some have shown that for Chinese speakers, their utterance comprehension involves speech act recognition. However, concerning of the illocutionary acts in conversational narratives, the research is far from adequate. A complete pragmatic method of narrative could adopt both an outside-in approach to functions of narrative in context, looking at what we accomplish in telling stories and at what effects pragmatics have in speech events; and an inside-out approach, looking at how recurrent units function within narratives. The results showed that conversational stories were performed with the different kinds of illocutionary speech act functions not just to state or illustrate an affair or a point, but with illocutionary forces both direct and indirect in apologizing, requesting and rejecting, even indirect in declarations, which had gained opposite ideas from Norrick’s (2015) claim in the denying of this function in conversational narratives. The study also showed that the leading narrator, the lady, employed identity construction in involving more direct illocutionary acts to familiar people than to strangers, and more indirect illocutionary acts in the entire narratives.

Stories of (self)-introduction for communicative effectiveness of an institutionalized storytelling performance

Over the last few decades, increasing interest in oral narratives as a point of entry into understanding self-presentation and construction of personal and social identities has led to several studies which adopt a contextualized approach to analyses of everyday conversational narratives. In this study, adopting a similar contextualized approach but focusing on a less spontaneous and more institutionalized type of oral storytelling, I examine the narrative told as an introduction to a professional storyteller before her storytelling performance, as well as the oral tale inscribed with institutional messages told during her storytelling performance. I discuss how the construction of storyteller’s identities in the narrative of introduction preceding the telling of an oral tale was an important strategy that enhanced the communicative effectiveness of the storytelling performance in disseminating the institutional messages. The study extends our understanding of the ways in which various institutions in contemporary society have been using storytelling performances by professional storytellers as a communicative, educative and meaning-making tool.

Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus and the Conversion of Neocaesarea

Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Gregory Thaumaturgus concludes with a scene describing how the people of Neocaesarea, while crowding together at a festival in the city’s theatre, bring a plague upon themselves by praying to their ancestral god. The prayer uttered by the citizens is itself a text from Isaiah in the Septuagint, and moreover a verse which Gregory of Nyssa expounds in one of his homilies. Gregory’s exegesis of that verse in the homily reveals the significance of the same verse’s appearance in the Life’s conversion narrative. In the Life, Gregory Thaumaturgus stops the plague, and his behavior evokes a subsequent verse from Isaiah with a soteriological meaning of its own. The account of the conversion of Neocaesarea, a scene which has otherwise puzzled commentators, is thus structured so that its people and Gregory Thaumaturgus together dramatize Isaiah’s prophecy of universal salvation as it was understood in Christian exegesis.

Lost and Found: Immigrant Conversion Stories, the New Evangelization, and Parish Life

The author reflects on a conversion narrative that emerged in the context of a yearlong ethnographic study of a Catholic parish in the Midwest. The study was intended to uncover the practices and understandings of parish life in a shared parish, that is, a parish with two or more distinct cultural communities with their own masses and ministries but sharing the same parish facilities. The “lost and found” narrative of conversion that emerged in the parish’s Latino/a community has roots in Latin American manifestations of the new evangelization but has taken particular form here in the United States. It frames conversion as the outcome of religious education, and it offers both gifts and limitations. On the one hand, immigrant parishioners receive a rich template for articulating their own stories of faith, especially in the midst of the dramatic change associated with migration to a new country. On the other hand, that same template has some polemical and reductionist themes that will trouble pastoral leaders and that may not serve the second generation well. Pastoral leaders and theologians do well to note both the advantages and ambiguities of this faith narrative as Latino/a Catholics move toward becoming the majority of U.S. Catholics.

Reflexivity on stories of conflict among Latin American teenage school girls in a multicultural school in Madrid

This paper looks at forms of reflexivity and the moral positioning of social actors, displayed in conversational narratives about school conflict, co-produced by Latin American girls during sociolinguistic interviews with a female researcher of Latin American origin, in a multicultural school in the centre of Madrid. Understanding narratives as communicative practices makes them suitable discursive spaces for revealing the moral positioning and moral orders constructed in discourse. These discursive positionings need to be considered in the light of the ethnographic conditions under which such narratives emerge (Patino-Santos, 2016). Herein, I analyse narratives recounting conflicts from two different groups – female secondary school students and their teachers – based on the notion that it is in recounting and evaluating moments of conflict that social actors call upon their systems of beliefs and values. The failure of the girls’ secondary school and all the negative repercussions of such failure are central to problematising the social circumstances in which their narratives are produced.

Conversion as Speech Act: Medieval Icelandic and Modern Neopagan Conversion Narratives

Previous articleNext article No AccessConversion as Speech Act: Medieval Icelandic and Modern Neopagan Conversion NarrativesKathleen M. SelfKathleen M. SelfSt. Lawrence University Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by History of Religions Volume 56, Number 2November 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/688216 Views: 323Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref © 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Sverrir Jakobsson Conversion and Cultural Memory in Medieval Iceland, Church History 88, no.11 (May 2019): 1–26.https://doi.org/10.1017/S0009640719000507

Mother-Child Conversations and Child Memory Narratives: The Roles of Child Gender and Attachment

AbstractThis study examined the roles of child gender and attachment in mother-child narrative conversations and child independent narratives. Children (Mage= 56 months) told personal narratives independently and while engaged in narrative conversations with their mothers. The Attachment Story Completion Task-Revised (Verschueren & Marcoen, 1994) measured child attachment representations. Results indicated that attachment was linked to maternal conversational style and child independent narratives. Mothers with secure sons continued their topics more than mothers of secure daughters, and secure boys’ independent narratives were less elaborative than those of secure girls. However, no gender differences were found among insecure dyads. We argue that mothers of secure boys sensitively recognize their sons’ cues within the conversational context and respond to the need for further verbal assistance, thus providing more on-topic replies in narrative conversations.

The Effectiveness of Narrative Therapy With Children's Social and Emotional Skill Development: An Empirical Study of 813 Problem-Solving Stories

This article examines the effectiveness of narrative therapy in boosting 8- to 10-year-old children's social and emotional skills in school. Data were collected from 353 children over two years, and two research assistants independently coded 813 stories. Children's personal accounts of their attempts at solving conflicts in their daily lives were collected before and after a series of narrative conversations, and compared to stories collected during the same time interval with a control group. The control data included a set of stories from waitlisted participants and those from students assigned to only a control group. The results of the study show that children receiving narrative therapy intervention showed a significant improvement in self-awareness, self-management, social awareness/empathy, and responsible decision making when compared to their own first stories and the stories from children in the control group. Improvement in relationship skills was present in both cohorts but was significant on...

Schütz's Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich? and the Politics of the Thirty Years War

For early modern Lutherans Heinrich Schütz's Saul, Saul, was verfolgst du mich? would have evoked fears of religious persecution. Its text, from the narrative of Paul's conversion in Acts 9, appears in seventeenth-century devotional writings and confessional polemics about persecution. Moreover, recently uncovered archival evidence shows that Schütz performed his concerto in 1632 at a state-sponsored political festival marking the first anniversary of the Battle of Breitenfeld, a major Protestant victory in the Thirty Years War. Here Schütz's concerto clearly stoked fears of persecution, because the celebrations touted the battle as a victory over Catholic oppression. The political context in 1632 might also explain some of the piece's most notable features. Its unusually brief text and vivid music do not illustrate the whole story of Saul's conversion but solely the moment at which Christ intervened to put a stop to persecution. Schütz's listeners would have heard in Saul's example a parallel to the victory they were celebrating in 1632 and the persecution they feared from their Catholic and imperial adversaries. This performance of Saul, the only one known from Schütz's lifetime, shows how his music partook in a broader campaign of Protestant propaganda designed to reinforce the confessional and political divisions that fueled this phase of the war.