The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England

By Holly Crawford Pickett

In The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England, Holly Crawford Pickett reconceptualizes early modern religious identity by exploring the astonishing stories of serial converts: historical figures such as William Alabaster, Kenelm Digby, William Chillingworth, and Marc Antonio De Dominis, along with fictional ones, who changed their religious affiliations between Catholicism and Protestantism multiple times. Pickett argues that serial converts both reveal and helped revise early modern understandings of the self. Through investigation of the techniques that serial converts used to stage and justify their conversions, Pickett demonstrates the performative nature of the act of conversion itself, offering a counternarrative to the paradigm of sincere, private conversion that was on the rise in the tumultuous years following the Reformation. Drawing from archival investigation into the lives and works of serial converts and performance studies theory, this book shows how the genres and conventions associated with conversion shaped not only forms of communication but also the very experience of conversion. By juxtaposing plays about serial conversion—by Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger, Thomas Middleton, Elizabeth Cary, Ben Jonson, and William Shakespeare—with spiritual autobiographies, Pickett highlights the shared task of convert and playwright: performing conversion for an audience.

Serial converts served as uncomfortable reminders to their contemporaries that religious identity is always unverifiable. The first study to explore serial conversion as a discrete phenomenon in this era, The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England challenges confessional divisions within much early modern historiography by analyzing the surprising convergence of Protestant and Catholic in the figure of the serial convert. It also reveals a neglected strain of religious discourse in early modern England that valued mutability and flexibility even in the midst of hardening and increasingly narrow understandings of conversion.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 12, 2024
• ISBN: 9781512825657

Holly Crawford Pickett

Holly Crawford Pickett is Associate Professor of English at Washington and Lee University.

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Cover: The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England by Holly Crawford Pickett

THE DRAMA OF SERIAL CONVERSION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND

Holly Crawford Pickett

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2024 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved.

Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

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University of Pennsylvania Press

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Hardback ISBN 978-1-5128-2564-0

eBook ISBN 978-1-5128-2565-7

To Howard, Clara, and Foster, with love

CONTENTS

Introduction

Chapter 1. I Must Dissemble Now: Performing Conversion in Anthony Tyrrell and in Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience

Chapter 2. Wonderfully and Sencybly Chaunged: Reading Conversion in William Alabaster, Augustine, and the Motives Genre

Chapter 3. All to All: Elizabeth Cary, William Chillingworth, and the Pauline Theater of Conversion

Chapter 4. Unstable Bodies: Ecumenism and the Science of Motion

Chapter 5. Contagion of the Imagination: Alchemy and Conversion in Ben Jonson and Kenelm Digby

Chapter 6. I Will Performe It: Dramatic Nostalgia and Spectacular Conversion in Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

After mounting London’s outdoor pulpit known as St. Paul’s Cross on December 8, 1588, Anthony Tyrrell found himself perched before a skeptical audience. He stood in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral to declare his recantation of Catholicism and return to England’s official Protestant Church. The trouble was he had been there before—in January of the same year, in fact—to do the same thing. On that occasion, however, he had shocked onlookers by delivering an anti-Protestant tirade instead of his promised recantation. As officials dragged him away that January, he had thrown copies of his pro-Catholic sermon to the crowd. Now Tyrrell hoped his dubious December audience might thorowlie be satisfied of my unfained meaning in the performance of this action.¹ Tyrrell’s terminology betrays the heart of his dilemma; although he needs to demonstrate an inner state (his "unfained meaning), he must do so externally (through the performance of this action"). How could Tyrrell, a serial convert, who eventually changed church affiliation as many as ten times, overcome the doubts of his suspicious audience?

Tyrrell and similar converts who made multiple conversions understandably aroused suspicions of hypocrisy that made the performative character of public recantation troublingly evident. Nevertheless, as I argue over the course of The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England, these performative elements are actually indispensable to any conversion, whether an individual’s first or fifteenth. Attending to the dramatic elements of religious conversion has implications for the definition not just of conversion, but also of religious identity. Building on Judith Butler’s influential arguments about gender, Musa Gurnis has argued, Like gender identity, religious identity is not a thing but a ‘stylized repetition of acts through time.’ ² Serial converts make both that repetition and its stylization salient for their contemporaries.

The Drama of Serial Conversion traces the ways that these overlooked figures redefine the nature of religious identity, and conversion in particular, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Admittedly, the serial converts examined in the coming chapters provoked skepticism, if not also censure, from their contemporary critics, who presumed (as do many historians today) that each of these conversions was motivated by little more than ambitious opportunism and self-interest. While I do not necessarily deny those motives (at least, not in every case discussed below), I do deny that the story ends there. By taking the converts at their word—by bracketing out the usual obsession with their sincerity—we can see alternative ways of thinking about religious transformation in the period and also, if ironically, alternative ways of thinking about sincerity. Although in many cases idiosyncratic, the serial converts’ expressed views map the edges of what was possible and intelligible in early modern religious thought and practice.

As I come to argue, faced with the challenge of making their conversion and new religious affiliation believable, serial converts adopted a variety of rhetorical, theological, and practical strategies to win the trust of a dubious audience. While all converts face similar challenges, serial converts face them more than most. The seriality of their conversion provokes more than the usual doubt in their audience, an audience made up of former and would-be coreligionists. Through their various efforts to justify and explain themselves to others, these converts draw out and, in some cases, innovate on the customs and conventions, the genres and tropes, associated with conversion in the day.

More to my point, by doing so, serial converts highlight and, in many cases, embrace the performativity, even theatricality of religious conversion. Like actors on the stage, converts must employ, often in a self-conscious way, the best ways to communicate their character—in this case, their religious character—to an audience. There is, then, a theatrical or, at least, performative quality to the communication of one’s conversion to others. However, a close look at their efforts to tell their stories leads us to wonder if the genres and conventions associated with conversion shaped not only their forms of communication but also their own experience of conversion. Through archival investigation into the lives and works of serial converts informed by performance studies theory, this book underscores the interpenetration of religious affiliation and drama, especially in the wake of the English Reformation. I argue that practices we associate with the theater are central to and inseparable from the experience of spiritual conviction, and that this insight is best understood by studying the extraordinary lives—both real and fictional—of the serial convert.

Certainly, a close look at the work by and about serial converts in the period reveals more than this theatrical understanding of conversion. Indeed, the theatrical aspects of serial conversion are evident—but not always made explicit by the converts. After all, to be explicitly theatrical might animate further suspicion, especially in an early modern Europe still dominated in many corners by what Jonas Barish has labeled the antitheatrical prejudice.³ Instead, as I demonstrate, especially in the later chapters of the book, serial converts often turned to other, less theatrical vocabularies in their attempts to justify their choices. Specifically, they explained their conversions with terms and concepts drawn from natural philosophy. By drawing comparisons between their religious biographies and the natural processes at work in creation, serial converts used scientific rhetoric to try to validate or naturalize their behavior. Through those comparisons, they imply that their religious transformations are as typical, acceptable, indeed as natural as the motions and changes of the physical world or else as esoteric but ineluctable as the processes at work in the occult science of alchemy. In effect, their comparisons suggest, if these processes are good enough for nature and God’s creation, then surely they should be good enough for the converts’ critics.

Conversion Culture and Its Discontents

By definition, religious converts transgress the boundaries of spiritual communities, shifting affiliation from one group to another. Even though pervasive in all aspects of our lives, change is an incredibly difficult concept to understand or to accept. We may never step in the same river twice, but life surely is easier both logistically and psychologically if we act as if we do.⁴ Religious conversion, at its most fundamental, is change, whether from irreligion to religion; or from one religion to another; or from one denomination to another; or from one theological position to another; or from a second hand to first hand experience of religion.⁵ A 1604 English dictionary defines the verb convert simply with the words turne, change.⁶ From the Latin for "to turn [vertere]," conversion always contains an element of flux. Nowhere does that fact become more evident or troublesome than in the religious biographies of serial converts. By repeating the conversion process, serial converts highlight the fundamental discontinuities inherent in that process and the resultant challenges to the constitution of a stable religious identity in the face of those disunities.

While conversion was most often associated with a monastic calling in medieval Christendom, the sectarian proliferation of post-Reformation Europe meant that early modern subjects had more choices and opportunities for religious conversion, especially as expressed through the changing of one’s confessional affiliation.⁷ Serial converts—rarely, if ever, fully at home in one religious community and forced to make a home in repeated vacillations among them—expose the artificiality of many binaries: Protestantism/Catholicism, inside/outside, and sincerity/hypocrisy. They exhibit a religious worldview that challenges the cultural fantasy of a stable self. They invite us, instead, to reimagine the self by replacing a supposedly static, immutable identity, what philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls "idem identity (from the Latin for same) with a complex, shifting narrative identity or ipseity (from the Latin for self").⁸ Moreover, serial converts flout the simple unity of the one-time conversion idealized in early modern Christian biography (for example, Saint Paul’s on the road to Damascus) as well as the singular peripeteia of classical drama (for example, Oedipus’s, according to Aristotle’s Poetics). They are defined more by motion than stasis. More controversially, they embrace performativity, sometimes even dissimulation. They attempt to chart a territory that sometimes crosses a line into deceit, and yet not into hypocrisy, raising the question of whether playacting can ever lead one closer to God. In the end, the serial convert does not so much reject a unified self or identity as paradoxically work toward unity through what looks like its opposite.

As a result, the early modern debates surrounding vacillating Protestant and Catholic converts reveal and often revise conceptions of selfhood in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England. Through their defenses of mutability, dissimulation, and ecclesiastical indifferentism (the view that denominational affiliation is relatively unimportant), serial converts offer a counternarrative to the emergent—soon to be dominant—paradigm of a sincere, affective, and private conversion.⁹ In fact, it is in part in reaction to the figure of the serial convert that early modern religious subjects articulate and solidify an emerging preference for a sincere (rather than performative) and affective (rather than cognitive) definition of religious subjectivity, one that is defined by both the inner feelings one has and the transparent expression of those feelings. In their aversion to the serial convert, the culture reifies the qualities we now associate with sincerity and sincere religious conversion, in particular.

By attending to the works by and about these boundary-crossing converts, The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England recovers a neglected strain of religious discourse in early modern England, a strain that values mutability and flexibility even in the midst of hardening and increasingly narrow understandings of religious identity. Drawing on a wide range of both Protestant and Catholic documents, as well as those that defy easy categorization—including religious tracts, sermons, and plays—the argument here is part of a larger body of scholarship that questions the stark confessionalism of much of the earlier historiography of the period. In this case, that convergence of Protestant and Catholic is embodied in the religious history of the serial convert.

Plenty of converts, including John Nichols, John Hart, Robert Gray, Martin Nelson, John Gee, Edward Osborne, Lawrence Caddey, Thomas Clarke, William Chillingworth, and even Ben Jonson, reverted back to their first religion after a short-lived conversion.¹⁰ But a smaller group shifted their religious identities over and over again. Anthony Tyrrell, William Alabaster, and Marc Antonio De Dominis, along with a few others, transformed themselves so often that they raised questions about the very notions of religious truth and identity about which they claimed to be repeatedly enlightened. William Alabaster, to whom I turn in Chapter 2, converted perhaps as many as five times; Anthony Tyrrell, subject of the first chapter, as many as ten. Although the exception rather than the rule, serial converts, I argue, harbor larger lessons for the study of early modern English religious identity at large.

By converting multiple times, serial converts expose the fact that a number of presumed truths about Christianity may not be, upon reflection, as self-evident as they seem. Like all converts, serial converts could make believers question the presumed superiority of their church. It is easy to dismiss one’s religious enemies as barbaric or unenlightened when they are complete strangers, but it may be much harder to do so when one’s newest enemy is a former coreligionist. Converts, then, might give momentary pause to their former community members’ vigorous assertions that their cause is the superior one. Even more than one-time converts, however, serialists could also raise questions about a number of other unspoken truths that believers might otherwise take for granted. While preachers may not have stood in their pulpits and taught their parishioners that multiple conversions would result in damnation, serial converts might make those churchgoers question whether or not that is the case. Indeed, serial converts call into question cultural presumptions about the conversion process, including the inherent (in)stability of religious identity, the legibility of conversion rituals as performative, and the ethics of changing one’s mind.

Most fundamentally, serial converts challenge the presumption that the religious subject should be both stable and authentic—that it should not, in other words, be associated with role-playing, theatricality, forgery, or dissimulation. Serial converts undermine this notion in a number of ways, through both actions and words. They present a paradigm of a fluid and mutable religious identity that shocks their contemporaries into questioning the conventional wisdom that equates the discrepancy between inside and outside with a harmful brand of religious hypocrisy. To be sure, the serial convert highlights the gap between the inner self and outer expression, and the epistemic anxiety that comes with it. However, as my readings uncover, serial converts also suggest a sometimes permissible, even desirable role for such a gap in a good, Christian life.

As I argue throughout the book, serial conversion interpolates the dramatic into the spiritual. One of the keys to understanding the manner in which it does so lies in the concept of seriality or repetition, since repetition is one of the hallmarks of parody, a form associated with subversive mimicry.¹¹ While the convert may be attempting to express religious fervor through a series of ecclesiastical shifts, the repetition of the action exposes the conventions of the ritual, making it seem parodic to that convert’s contemporaries. The parodic effect, in turn, suggests a kind of irony or derision that may not have been intended, but may nevertheless be imputed to the convert. Moreover, if a shift in churches is one of the available ways to denote a deepening religious commitment, does the repetition of that movement serve to expose the potential inadequacy or artificiality of Christian sectarian divisions themselves? Just as the analytic mimicry of parody can expose any weakness, pretension, or lack of self-awareness in its original, serial converts can call into question the solidity and givenness of the religious system they are inhabiting.¹²

Likewise, serial converts reveal—and, in bringing to awareness, destabilize—an underlying presumption among most religious thinkers that conversion should be once and for all. By departing from the Pauline or Damascene ideal of swift and unalterable change, serial converts expose this unspoken conviction more than any other. Although the charge of instability is one of the most frequent reactions to converts in the polemical literature of the day, the fault-finding authors rarely offer any explicit explanations of why changing one’s mind is objectionable. One could, instead, as some converts do, make the counterargument that the number of conversions is immaterial as long as the end result is sound, or that this disposition to open-mindedness is more virtue than vice. In choosing between these positions, authors reveal their underlying assumptions about the nature of religious transformation: is it more like abandoning one’s commitment to a spouse, as critics sometimes imply, or changing one’s scientific hypothesis based on new data, as at least one serial convert intimates? This broad and often unreflective gut reaction to the ethical valence of changing positions reveals itself in countless responses to serial converts in the early modern period.

The fundamental claim, then, of The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England is that serial converts expose a number of common, but unstable, assumptions within early modern England’s religious landscape. Through reiterative conversion, these individuals draw our attention to the uncomfortable realities of religious uncertainty in the post-Reformation world. They reveal the way that the conversion culture that emerges from the period’s emphasis on perpetual religious reforms actually puts enormous pressure on religious identity. They do so not only through publicizing their own multiple shifts, but also by exposing the multiple shifts within their larger community, especially as they recall the vicissitudes of England’s own multiple Reformations. After all, following its decades-long religious shifts, back and forth from Catholicism to Protestantism during the period, England itself was something of a serial convert. The cultural anxieties that these recanting converts generate can, therefore, provide an indirect commentary on the discomfort the English may have felt about their own country’s religious past. By emphatically refusing to stick with one church or the other, these converts expose an open secret of English religious identity: widespread personal doubt and spiritual instability.¹³

The Prehistory of Sincerity

Reformation attitudes to conversion help foster the emphasis on sincerity that comes to define the evangelical conversion narrative of the eighteenth century and beyond, a narrative that is still somewhat nascent and contested in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.¹⁴ Both Reformed theology and Elizabethan religious policy contribute to the emergent discourse of sincerity, the advent of which Lionel Trilling attributes to sixteenth-century European culture. As Trilling defines it, sincerity is the congruence between avowal and actual feeling.¹⁵ Trilling notes that the word enters the English language in the first third of the sixteenth century and that in that same century it quickly evolved to mean not just pure or clean, as it did in Latin, but the absence of dissimulation or feigning or pretence.¹⁶ He traces its development, in part, to the burgeoning theater culture of the period: It is surely no accident that the idea of sincerity, of the own self and the difficulty of knowing and showing it, should have arisen to vex men’s minds in the epoch that saw the sudden efflorescence of the theatre.¹⁷

For Trilling and others, such as John Martin, the rise of sincerity is also a deeply religious movement. Although he concedes that the search for the sincere self began earlier, Martin claims that it was the early Protestant reformers who elevated sincerity to a defining virtue.¹⁸ He notes the importance that Luther and Calvin placed on the notion of the sincere heart, especially in their commentaries on the Psalms, and draws particular attention to Calvin’s personal emblem: "a hand-held heart, presented as a kind of offering to his readers and to God—the inscription read: prompte et sincere [promptly and sincerely]."¹⁹

Elizabethan church policy also contributes to the growing prominence of sincerity as an object of attention and concern within religious discourse. As part of the so-called Elizabethan settlement, the 1559 Act of Uniformity required church attendance by every person and persons inhabiting within this realm.²⁰ In practice, that requirement meant that regardless of Elizabethan subjects’ set of beliefs, they were expected to attend Protestant services regularly at a local parish church. While it may sound draconian today, the law was considered a moderate compromise by early modern standards. It established a middle way (via media) between those who wanted more stringent standards of religious loyalty (such as communion taking), on the one hand, and those who wanted no religious legislation at all, on the other. As Francis Bacon famously claimed, her Majesty (not liking to make windows into men’s hearts and secret thoughts, except the abundance of them did overflow into overt and express acts and affirmations,) tempered her law so, as it restraineth only manifest disobedience in impugning and impeaching advisedly and maliciously her Majesty’s supreme power, and maintaining and extolling a foreign jurisdiction.²¹ Elizabeth, according to Bacon at least, was concerned with the overt, not the secret. Required church attendance was designed to be a modest indication that a subject maintained the bare minimum of obedience.

One unintended side effect of the English church’s policy on religious conformity is that it fostered a paradigm of religious identity centered on questions of sincerity and hypocrisy, while simultaneously—and paradoxically—encouraging many people to violate that paradigm. The Elizabethan doctrine of conformity, in effect, cultivates the essentially theatrical religious paradigm that serial converts will both suffer under and promote throughout the period. As Jeffrey Shoulson has argued, the Elizabeth settlement sought to foster sincere religious identity. On the other hand, it rewarded—at least temporarily—insincere conformity.²² In drawing a distinction between the overt and the secret, the Elizabethan settlement—whether intentionally or not—aggravated the fissure between action and intention, between performance and belief, in short, between inside and outside. In doing so, the policy seems to have sanctioned a kind of hypocrisy, even theatricality, in religious matters. As Peter Lake has pointed out, even Bacon’s famous dictum about the queen—that she did not wish to make windows into men’s souls—here acquired a particular political edge. Namely, the policy, at least potentially, opened up a gap between the inward and the outward, the real inner convictions of a person and his or her outward behavior, a space which, it seemed to many contemporaries, could be exploited for all sorts of dissimulation and pretence by the faithless and the unscrupulous.²³

Ramie Targoff goes so far as to claim that there were no absolute divisions between sincerity and theatricality, inwardness and outwardness within the early modern English church. Although recognizing the potential for externally convincing but internally empty acts of devotion, established churchmen tended to minimize the threat that such dissembling posed either to the dissemblers themselves or to the congregation of eyewitnesses.²⁴ Targoff traces the Elizabethan clergy’s confidence in the efficacy of the Book of Common Prayer’s liturgy back to an Aristotelian belief in the power of habit. This understanding of habitual practice, she claims, helps to explain how the religious establishment could simultaneously seem uninterested in private belief and yet demonstrate repeatedly its desire to subsume private devotion within the public liturgy of the church. Indeed, what appears to be a simple request for an untaxing and potentially unmeaningful participation in a weekly service turns out to be a strategy to transform the worshipper’s soul.²⁵

A number of English divines echoed the transformative potential of church attendance, even for the initially resistant, even for the dissembling. As Michael C. Questier describes the churchman William Bradshaw’s view, Even if church attendance was not in itself true religion, the exposition of the attender to godly preaching, the normal instrument of effectual conversion, could turn what William Bradshaw called ‘Protestants of state’ into ‘Protestants of religion.’ ²⁶ Likewise, as the former nonconformist Richard Bernard put it, many that for fear of law were first brought to the Church, & outward profession of the truth, have been and are effectually converted by the ministry of the word.²⁷ If the policy can get the unconvinced in the door, the logic goes, then the work of the liturgy (a term from the Greek, meaning the work of the people) could potentially convert that unconvinced participant.

One could argue that the church’s conformity policy, then, was predicated on the hope that its liturgy could create converts. Indeed, as William Chillingworth points out, a harsher policy could have backfired on the church by making the resistant even more resentful and rebellious: for humane violence may make men counterfeit, but cannot make them beleeve, and is therefore fit for nothing but to breed forme without, and Atheisme within.²⁸ A stricter policy could make the hypocrisy problem worse, as participation can be coerced but belief cannot. So while presumably aware of the potential problem they were fostering, Elizabeth’s clerics and officials argued that the policy was better than possible alternatives and had the potential to transform pretended devotion into true worship.

Hiding within the Act of Uniformity are two rival paradigms of religious identity: one that inspires an interest in or anxiety about the sincerity of the churchgoer, which cannot be ascertained from their participation alone, and a second that emphasizes the potential of rituals to transform the participant, regardless of that person’s initial, inward state. This rivalry is not unique to early modern England. Sociologist of religion Adam B. Seligman calls these two rival camps the ritualists and sincerists.²⁹ Drawing on the work of Roy Rappaport, Seligman situates ritual inside the category anthropologists term … an iterated performative. It is an action that is repeated, that, in the correct times or circumstances, is done again and again. In that it is repeated it is also formalized.³⁰ Sincerity, in contrast, often grows out of a reaction against ritual. It criticizes ritual’s acceptance of social convention as mere action (perhaps even just acting) without intent, as performance without belief.³¹

By calling ritual a performative, Seligman invokes an interdisciplinary concept, one with its genesis in the speech act theory of J. L. Austin and his book How to Do Things with Words (1962). There, Austin claimed "to say something is to do something, or in saying something we do something, and even by saying something we do something."³² Austin’s concept of a performative utterance—epitomized by the I do of a marriage ceremony (which, when said, renders the participants legally conjoined)—has since been adapted to other forms of human behavior besides speech, including gender construction (Judith Butler) and sexuality (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick). It has also been applied to academic work in ethnography (Victor Turner) and performance studies (Richard Schechner).³³ Whether they call it ritual or performance, each of these writers stresses the enacted nature of human behavior. Moreover, each eschews a search for motives in favor of thick description and a focus on context.³⁴

Brian Cummings has recently highlighted the fact that Austin’s own definition of a performative utterance is derived "(more or less verbatim, perhaps from a schoolboy memory) [from] the definition of a sacrament from the catechism of the 1662 Book of Common Prayer," although, as Cummings points out, the formulation had been a part of the Book of Common Prayer since 1604.³⁵ For Cummings, this citation confirms how the theory of speech acts takes us straight into the nerve ends of the Reformation. After all, it was discomfort with the rituals of the medieval church, which reformers saw as outward bodily performance[s] stripped of inner motivation or belief, that launched the innovations of early Protestant belief and practice.³⁶ In the debates about the sincerity or authenticity of the serial convert’s ritualized performance of conversion, we find ourselves at the center of a crucial tension in post-Reformation Europe.

In Putting On Virtue, the theological ethicist Jennifer A. Herdt likewise argues that a tension between those who champion a theatrical conception of moral development and those who deem such a theatrical conception false and hypocritical has shaped Christian thought since at least the Middle Ages.³⁷ She demonstrates the ways in which Erasmus, for example, offers what could be considered a performative conception of virtue: we develop the virtues only by enacting them, and so transform being through doing.³⁸ In the Jesuit theatrical tradition of the seventeenth century, moreover, Herdt establishes a more specific connection between performance and religious conversion. She analyzes two plays, one by Jakob Bidermann (1578–1639) and the other by Lope de Vega (1562–1635), that portray the conversion of a pagan actor to Christianity while onstage. For these playwrights, conversion can involve a certain degree of role-playing, of becoming the part one acts.³⁹ In seventeenth-century England, the Protestant controversialist Richard Crakanthorpe drew on the same story of the pagan actor Genesius’s onstage conversion in his discussion of the seriousness ascribed to baptism rituals in late antiquity. He chronicles the miraculous transition of Genesius’s baptism from the mimical to the earnest. What began merely in imitation, or even mockery, of the central ritual act of Christian conversion resulted in Genesius’s actual transformation, being truly and sincerely converted and then promptly martyred.⁴⁰

Within the contours of the debate between Seligman’s ritualists and sincerists, or between Herdt’s theatrical champions and opponents, we can discern many of the clashes between serial converts and their critics. To return to the concept of iteration at the heart of many definitions of both ritual and performance, the serial convert underlines the already-iterated nature of the ritualized behaviors that constitute religious conversion. When iteration becomes reiterated, it can create discomfort or even plant a suspicion of parody. In reaction to the discomfort that the serial convert inspires, the community (or the most vocal and influential portion of it) strengthens its preference for the emergent paradigm of sincere conversion that rendered the serial convert such an enigma. By attending to the dueling strains of sincere and performative rhetoric in the works of serial converts, one detects a challenge to the hegemony of the sincere ideal in the interpretation of religious identity, offering a counternarrative in which change, flux, and metamorphosis can serve as a productive and creative force, rather than just a threatening or obscuring one.⁴¹

While Austin’s term performative utterance lies in the future, the new Protestant English Church nevertheless embraced the way that the performance of a devotional act could influence the inner state of the performer or actor. From the Act of Uniformity to the Book of Common Prayer, the English church acknowledged the potential power of a ritualist interpretation of religious behavior, even as Reformist theology stressed the importance of a sincere heart. Serial converts, therefore, stand at the crossroads of such debates in early modern England, illustrating the tension between inner and outer in their often flagrantly dramatic series of transformations.

Conversion Disnarratives

Having made a case for the usefulness of applying a performance studies framework to the culture of serial conversion in early modern England, there remains a methodological question about how best to access and analyze those conversion performances. Our best chance at recovering the insights that early modern converts can provide lies, I contend, in analyzing the variety of documents written by and about their conversions—pamphlets, sermons, letters, confessional statements, biographies, autobiographies, and fictional or dramatic narratives. Converts used the generic conventions available to them—whether those governing a religious tract or a stage play—as experiments in mapping and shaping the author’s and