Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance - Hardcover

Britton, Dennis Austin

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0823257142 ISBN 13: 9780823257140

Publisher: Fordham University Press, 2014

Synopsis

Becoming Christian argues that romance narratives of Jews and Muslims converting to Christianity register theological formations of race in post-Reformation England. The medieval motif of infidel conversion came under scrutiny as Protestant theology radically reconfigured how individuals acquire religious identities.

Whereas Catholicism had asserted that Christian identity begins with baptism, numerous theologians in the Church of England denied the necessity of baptism and instead treated Christian identity as a racial characteristic passed from parents to their children. The church thereby developed a theology that both transformed a nation into a Christian race and created skepticism about the possibility of conversion. Race became a matter of salvation and damnation.

Britton intervenes in critical debates about the intersections of race and religion, as well as in discussions of the social implications of romance. Examining English translations of Calvin, treatises on the sacraments, catechisms, and sermons alongside works by Edmund Spenser, John Harrington, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Phillip Massinger, Becoming Christian demonstrates how a theology of race altered a nation’s imagination and literary landscape.

About this title

About the Author:

Dennis Austin Britton is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. His areas of research include early modern English literature, Reformation theology, and race and ethnic studies. In 2012, he received a year-long National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Review:

“Becoming Christian is an exciting study that offers a theological account of race and racialization in early modern England, and explores the way this theology of race informs the cultural imagination.” (―Joan Pong Linton Indiana University)

Britton’s book serves as a model of intersectional approaches to early modern race, animating connections among skin color, bloodline, faith, and geography...The journey is exhilarating and Britton a remarkably enlightened guide. (Jean E. Ferrick ―Renaissance Quarterly)

“What is strikingly original in Britton’s work is the underlying insistence on unearthing the ways English theologians and writers made use of a religious motif –baptism– as a coded racial marker.” (―Margot Hendricks University of California, Santa Cruz)

Above and beyond its substantial contribution to early modern literary studies, Becoming Christian gives the effort of conversion and the work of baptism new meaning and momentum. As such, this book is not only about romance: it also participates in romance, a literary form that draws its extraordinary resilience from its capacity to serve as a tool for living. (―Julia Reinhard Lupton, The Spenser Review)

...this is an important book, showing in no uncertain terms how profoundly the construction of Protestant religious difference impacted England's relations not just with other Europeans, but with the populations across the globe that it would increasingly encounter as a Christian nation in the age of empire. (―Barbara Fuchs, SEL: Studies in English Literature)

Dennis Britton's excellent Becoming Christian uncovers with rigor, clarity, and breadth a hitherto neglected, protoracialist component to early modern Christianity. (―Modern Philology)

About this edition

• Publisher: Fordham University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0823257142
• ISBN 13: 9780823257140
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 272