Introduction / Paul Yachnin and Bronwen Wilson -- The conversional politics of compliance : oaths and autonomy in Henrician England / Peter Marshall -- The Sepulchre group : a site of artistic, religious, and cultural conversion / Ivana Vranic -- Stony bundles and precious wrappings : the making of patio crosses in sixteenth-century New Spain / Anthony Meyer -- The conversion of the built environment : classical architecture and urbanism as a form of colonisation in viceregal Mexico / Juan Luis Burke -- Material and spiritual conversions : Jacopo Ligozzi and the Descrizione del Sacro Monte della Vernia (1612) / Bronwen Wilson -- 'Haeretici typus, et descriptio' : heretical and anti-heretical image-making in Jan David SJ's Veridicus Christianus / Walter S. Melion -- Disorientation as a conversion machine in The Island of Hermaphrodites (1605) / Kathleen Long -- Dynamic conversions : grief and joy in George Herbert's Musical Verse / Anna Lewton-Brain -- Theatres of machines and theatres of cruelty : instruments of conversion on the early modern stage / Yelda Nasifoglu -- Body or soul : proving your religion in the early modern Mediterranean / Eric R. Dursteler -- What machines cannot do : a Leibnizian Animadversion / Justin Smith -- Human conversion machines : Hamlet and others / Paul Yachnin.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Conversion machines are apparatuses, artfully-fashioned preparations, arrangements, and things that demonstrate processes of change. They are paradoxical things - at once intent on verifying what was invisible, uncertain, and even unknowable, while also acting as sowers of dissimulation. The book does not seek to mechanize conversion. In many ways, conversion and the transformation of the convert will remain ineffable. But we maintain 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, the contributors to the volume consider how early moderns suffered under the mechanisms of conversion, sometimes were able to realize themselves by dint of being caught up in the machinery of sovereignty, invented scores of new, purpose-built conversional instruments, and experienced forms of radical transformation in their own bodies."-- From publisher's website.

Description based on online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on July 21, 2023).

Added to collection customer.56279.3