The Turn of the Soul

Scholars of art history, literature, and religion examine the portrayal of religious conversion during a period of religious ferment fueled by the Protestant and Catholic Reformation, Western European colonial enterprises in the Americas, and Ottoman colonial expansion. Their topics include the conversion of Christian II of Denmark in Roman Catholic diplomatic literature 1530-32, narrating conversion and subjecthood in the Venetian-Ottoman borderlands, conversion in James Shirley's St. Patrick for Ireland (1640), the sermons of a rabbi converted to Christianity, and Paul as a model of conversion in rhetoricians' drama. Annotation c2012 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Lieke Stelling is a junior researcher at the University of Leiden. Her PhD thesis, which focuses on representations of religious conversion in early modern English drama, will be completed in the course of 2012. She has published essays on the work of Shakespeare and Massinger; an article on the Nachleben of St. Augustine’s conversion is due to appear in 2012.Harald Hendrix, PhD (1993) in Italian Studies, is full professor and chair of Italian Studies and head of the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Utrecht. He has published widely on the European reception of Italian Renaissance and Baroque culture, on the early modern aesthetics of the non-beautiful as well as on literary culture and memory. Amongst his recent publications is the edited volume Writers' Houses and the Making of Memory (2007). Todd M. Richardson, Ph.D. (2007) in Art History, is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Memphis. He is the author of Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Art Discourse in the Sixteenth-Century Netherlands (2011) and the co-editor of two volumes: The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Art (2011) and Image and Imagination of the Religious Self in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2008).