Understanding Conversion (Page-Barbour Lecture Series)

Understanding Conversion examines the ways in which people made sense of religious conversion during the twelfth century, a critical time in the formation of Western moral values. It also indicates that the understanding of conversion, rooted as it was in medieval love of indirect and intricate allegorical symbolism, entered the permanent legacy of Western literature and art. The idea of conversion became a mythic strategy of survival in conflict with the world, the flesh, and the devil.

The book holds that the idea of conversion was a study in esthetics, specifically in a male esthetic combining the brotherhood of warriors with the genius of the poetry. It explores ascetic discipline, social myth, and representational art as components in a vast, militantly aggressive educational system that served as context for the conversion process.

Understanding Conversion involved understanding how the soul, God's work of art, defaced by sin, had to be restored to the image that its Maker had given it. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the age of Crusades and cathedrals, the militance in the idea of conversion made its career one of persecution, a pattern that continued later in the era of colonial expansion. Morrison explores how tactics of aggression were understood to be prescriptions for restoring human dignity. He examines implications that such thinking had for ideas of self and society and for attitudes both toward Christian women, who were considered peripheral to the male esthetic, and toward all non-Christians, who were thought alien to it. One argument that emerges is that twelfth-century ideals about conversion have survived recognizably, though with modification, into the twentieth century and ironically, that they can be detected in literature of the Holocaust.