This volume asks, how did theatrical practice shape the multiplying forms of conversion that emerged in early modern Europe? Each chapter focuses on a specific city or selection of cities, beginning with Venice, then moving to London, Mexico City, Tlaxcalla, Seville, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zürich, Berne, and Lucerne (among others). Collectively, these studies establish a picture of early modernity as an age teeming with both excitement and anxiety over conversional activity. In addition to considering the commercial theater that produced professional dramatists such as Lope de Vega and Thomas Middleton, the volume surveys a wide variety of kinds of theatre that brought theatricality into formative relationship with conversional practice. Examples range from civic pageantry in Piazza San Marco, to mechanical statues in Amsterdam’s pleasure labyrinths, to the dramatic dialogues performed by students of rhetoric in colonial Mexico. As a whole, the volume addresses issues of conversion as it pertains to early modern theatre, literature, theology, philosophy, economics, urban culture, globalism, colonialism, trade, and cross-cultural exchange.
José R. Jouve Martin is Professor of Hispanic Studies and Chair of the Department of Languages, Literatures, and Cultures at McGill University. He is the author of the books Slaves of the Lettered City (2005) and The Black Doctors of Colonial Lima: Science, Race, and Writing in Colonial and Early Republican Peru (2014). He has co-edited the volumes The Constitution of the Hispanic Baroque (2008), From the Baroque to the Neo-Baroque: Cultural Realities and Cultural Transfers (2011), Contemporary Debates in Ecology, Culture, and Society in Latin America (2011), and Culture Policy and Cultural Markets in Latin America (2013).
Stephen Wittek is Assistant Professor of Literature at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, PA. His research focuses on the media of conversion and the early modern English stage. He is the author of The Media Players: Shakespeare, Middleton, Jonson, and the Idea of News (University of Michigan Press, 2015). Other projects of note include a new edition of The Merchant of Venice for Internet Shakespeare Editions (co-edited with Janelle Jenstad) and the digital humanities project, DREaM, a database that indexes 44,000+ early modern texts, thus making long-neglected material more amenable for use with large-scale analytical tools (with Stéfan Sinclair and Matt Milner).
