Conversion: Old Worlds and New

by Kenneth Mills, Anthony Grafton, Allan Greer, Andrew Isenberg, Brad S. Gregory

Overview

A historical investigation of the phenomena of religious conversion from ancient to modern times.

This volume explores the subject of religious conversion over broad expanses of time and space, considering cases from the thirteenth through the twentieth centuries and from settings across the world. Leading scholars from a variety of historical sub-fields address the theme at a moment when the utility of the concept of conversion is vigorously debated. The historical settings treated here stretch from thirteenth-century England to sixteenth-century southern India and Andean Peru, from Bohemia to China during the age of the Reformations, from the fifteenth-century Low Countries to seventeenth-century New France and from the nineteenth-century Minnesota borderlands to late colonial Zimbabwe and modern India. The book's broad mixture of examples and approaches will both encourage a deepening of specialist knowledge about particular places and times, and spark new thinking about religious change, cultural appropriations, and interactive emergence across discipline and fields.

This book is one of two collections of essays on religious conversion drawn from the activities of the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton Universitybetween 1999 and 2001. The other volume, Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, is also published by the University of Rochester Press.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781580461238
Publisher:	BOYDELL & BREWER INC
Publication date:	07/25/2003
Series:	ISSN , #3
Edition description:	ANN
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

JOHN VAN ENGEN is Professor Emeritus, University of Notre Dame.

Table of Contents

Conversion and Compromise in Thirteenth-Century England - Valerie I.J. Flint
Conversion and Conformity in the Early Fifteenth Century - John Van Engen
To the Point of Shedding Your Blood: The Bible, Communities of Faith and Martyrs' Resistance to Conversion in the Reformation Era - Brad S. Gregory
Translating Christianity: Counter-Reformation Europe and the Catholic Mission in China, 1580-1780 - R. Po-chia Hsia
Twisting a Pagan Tongue: Portuguese and Tamil in Sixteenth- Century Jesuit Translations - Ines Zupanov
Converting the Ancestors: Indirect Rule, Settlement Consolidation, and the Struggle over Burial in Colonial Peru (1532-1614) - Peter Gose
Conversion and Identity: Iroquois Christianity in Seventeenth-Century New France - Allan Greer
Object Lessons: Fetishism and the Hierarchies of Race and Religion - David Murray
To see inside of an Indian: Missionaries and Dakotas in the Minnesota Borderlands - Andrew C. Isenberg
Tickets, Concerts and School Fees: Money and New Christian Communities in Colonial Zimbabwe 1900-40 - L. Carol Summers
Literacy in the Eye of India's Conversion Storm - Gauri Viswanathan

Editorial Reviews

Offer[s] key insights into the study of religious conversion across various 'subfields of history'. . . impressive contributions to the reassessment of the role of religion in history.

COMITATUS

Offer[s] key insights into the study of religious conversion across various "subfields of history". . . impressive contributions to the reassessment of the role of religion in history. COMITATUS

From the Publisher