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• Part I: Young Christendom and the fading pagan gods. Augustine of Hippo (354-430) ; The way, the truth, the life, the Empire ; Coercion, conversion, and heresy
• Part II: From Convivencia to the stake. Bishop Paul of Burgos (c. 1352-1435) ; Impureza de sangre : the crumbling of the Convivencia ; The Inquisition and the end
• Part III: Reformations. John Donne (1572-1631) ; "Not with sword ... but with printing" ; Persecution in an age of religious conversion
• Part IV: Conversions in the dawn of the Enlightenment. Margaret Fell (1614-1702) : woman's mind, woman's voice ; Religious choice and early Enlightenment thought ; Miracles versus evidence : conversion and science ; Prelude: O my America!
• Part V: The Jewish conversion question : where Christianity stumped its toe. Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) : convictionless conversion ; The varieties of coercive experience ; Edith Stein (1891-1942) : the sainthood of a converted Jew
• Part VI: American exceptionalism : toward religious choice as a natural right. Peter Cartwright (1785-1872) : anti-intellectualism and the battle for reason ; Remaking the Protestant American compact
• Interregnum: Absolutism and its discontents. True believers
• Part VII: The way we live now. "The greatest" : Muhammad Ali and the demythologizing decade ; American dreaming
• Conclusion: Darkness visible.

"In a groundbreaking historical work that addresses religious conversion in the West from an uncompromisingly secular perspective, Susan Jacoby challenges the conventional narrative of conversion as a purely spiritual journey. From the transformation on the road to Damascus of the Jew Saul into the Christian evangelist Paul to a twenty-first-century "religious marketplace" in which half of Americans have changed faiths at least once, nothing has been more important in the struggle for reason than the right to believe in the God of one's choice or to reject belief in God altogether. Focusing on the long, tense convergence of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--each claiming possession of absolute truth--Jacoby examines conversions within a social and economic framework that includes theocratic coercion (unto torture and death) and the more friendly persuasion of political advantage, economic opportunism, and interreligious marriage. Moving through time, continents, and cultures--the triumph of Christianity over paganism in late antiquity, the Spanish Inquisition, John Calvin's dour theocracy, Southern plantations where African slaves had to accept their masters' religion--the narrative is punctuated by portraits of individual converts embodying the sacred and profane. The cast includes Augustine of Hippo; John Donne; the German Jew Edith Stein, whose conversion to Catholicism did not save her from Auschwitz; boxing champion Muhammad Ali; and former President George W. Bush. The story also encompasses conversions to rigid secular ideologies, notably Stalinist Communism, with their own truth claims. Finally Jacoby offers a powerful case for religious choice as a product of the secular Enlightenment. In a forthright and unsettling conclusion linking the present with the most violent parts of the West's religious past, she reminds us that in the absence of Enlightenment values, radical Islamists are persecuting Christians, many other Muslims, and atheists in ways that recall the worst of the Middle Ages."--Book jacket.

• Conversion and compromise in the early 15th century, Flint and Van Engen-- "To the point of shedding your blood" - the Bible, communities of faith, and martyrs' resistance to conversion in the Reformation era, Gregory-- translating Christianity - counter-Reformation Europe and the Catholic mission in China, 1580-1780, Po-Chia Hsia--twisting a pagan tongue - Portuguese and Tamil in 16th-century Jesuit translations, Zupanov-- converting the ancestors - indirect rule, settlement consolidstion, and the struggle over burial in colonial Peru, 1532-1614, Gose-- conversion and identity - Iroquois Christianity in 17th century New France, Greer-- object lessons - fetishism and the hierarchies of race and religion, Murray--"To see inside of an Indian" - missionaries and Dakotas in the Minnnesota borderlands, Isenberg-- tickets, concerts and school fees - money and New Christian communities in colonial Zimbabwe, Summers-- literacy in the eye of India's conversion story, Viswanathan.
• (source: Nielsen Book Data)

This volume explores the subject of religious conversion over broad expanses of time and space, considering cases from the thirteenth through the twentieth centuries and from settings across the world. Leading scholars from a variety of historical sub-fields address the theme at a moment when the utility of the concept of conversion is vigorously debated. The historical settings treated here stretch from thirteenth-century England to sixteenth-century southern India and Andean Peru, from Bohemia to China during the age of the Reformations, from the fifteenth-century Low Countries to seventeenth-century New France and from the nineteenth-century Minnesota borderlands to late colonial Zimbabwe and modern India. The book's broad mixture of examples and approaches will both encourage a deepening of specialist knowledge about particular places and times, and spark new thinking about religious change, cultural appropriations, and interactive emergence across discipline and fields. This book is one of two collections of essays on religious conversion drawn from the activities of the Shelby Cullum Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University between 1999 and 2001. The other volume, Conversion in Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages, is also published by the University of Rochester Press.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

The first history of early modern conversation in English. In the classical period, conversation referred to real conversations, conducted in the leisure time of noble men, and concerned with indefinite philosophical topics. Christianity inflected conversation with universal aspirations during the medieval centuries and the 'ars dictaminis', the art of letter writing, increased the importance of this written analogue of conversation. The Renaissance humanists from Petrarch onward further transformed conversation, and its genre analogues of dialogue and letter, by transforming it into a metaphor of increasing scope. This expanded realm of humanist conversation bifurcated in Renaissance and early modern Europe. 'The Concept of Conversation' traces the way the rise of conversation spread out from the history of rhetoric to include the histories of friendship, the court and the salon, the Republic of Letters, periodical press and women. It revises JUrgen Habermas' history of the emergence of the rational speech of the public sphere as the history of the emergence of rational conversation and puts the emergence of women's speech at the centre of the intellectual history of early modern Europe.Key FeaturesThe first book-length history of early modern conversation in EnglishSynthesizes early modern intellectual history within the frameworks of rhetoric and conversationPlaces the history of women's speech at the heart of the history of early modern rhetoricFuses Habermas' historical-theoretical framework to the history of rhetoric and revises both.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

In early modern Germany, religious conversion was a profoundly social and political phenomenon rather than purely an act of private conscience. Because social norms and legal requirements demanded that every subject declare membership in one of the state-sanctioned Christian churches, the act of religious conversion regularly tested the geographical and political boundaries separating Catholics and Protestants. In a period when church and state cooperated to impose religious conformity, regulate confessional difference, and promote moral and social order, the choice to convert was seen as a disruptive act of disobedience. Investigating the tensions inherent in the creation of religious communities and the fashioning of religious identities in Germany after the Thirty Years' War, Duane Corpis examines the complex social interactions, political implications, and cultural meanings of conversion in this moment of German history. In Crossing the Boundaries of Belief, Corpis assesses how conversion destabilized the rigid political, social, and cultural boundaries that separated one Christian faith from another and that normally tied individuals to their local communities of belief. Those who changed their faiths directly challenged the efforts of ecclesiastical and secular authorities to use religious orthodoxy as a tool of social discipline and control. In its examination of religious conversion, this study thus offers a unique opportunity to explore how women and men questioned and redefined their relationships to local institutions of power and authority, including the parish clergy, the city government, and the family.
(source: Nielsen Book Data)

"During the Early Modern Period, thousands of Protestants converted to Roman Catholicism in Rome. Based on numerous unpublished Vatican sources, the author examines the institutional, political, and religious aspects of this phenomenon. She also explores the fate of those who converted. This multi-perspectival approach shows the history of conversions as a fruitful field of research for examining elements of cultural contact as well as associated processes of exchange and adaptation." --Summary from Angus & Robertson website, accessed 11 Jan. 2013.