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Jeffrey S. Shoulson Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England

The past decade has seen much scholarly attention paid to fault lines within the English Reformation and to the instability of individual religious identities within a confessionally unstable Christian nation. One of the latest contributions to this body of scholarship, Jeffrey Shoulson’s Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England is also one of the most idiosyncratic, reapproaching the subject of conversion from a number of angles, both acute and oblique. Shoulson begins by rehearsing what must be, by now, a pair of near commonplaces: first, that Protestantism did not triumph smoothly or conclusively in early modern England and, second, that many English Christians of the period understood conversion, whether from one church to another or within souls, as an ‘‘ongoing, incomplete, [and] impermanent’’ process (21). While he might overstate the point slightly—after all, England did become a largely Protestant nation in a matter of decades, and most English converts did not subsequently recant—Shoulson joins a number of church historians and literary critics in emphasizing the contingency and fluidity of early modern English Christianity. Where he departs from the work of scholars like Michael Questier, Peter Lake, Alison Shell, Alexandra Walsham, and myself, however, is in another pair of more original claims: first, that we should understand religious conversion as only one of numerous, interconnected ‘‘cultures of change’’ in early modern England (the others treated in the book are translation, alchemy, and religious enthusiasm) and, second, that the figure of the converted and converting Jew provided a crucial heuristic for early modern thinking about such change.