Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage

Degenhardt anatomizes English anxieties and defenses with consummate skill...Her analysis of the ''imaginative process whereby religious identities became fused with national, embodied, and proto-racial categories'' is brilliant.

--Reviewed by Richmond Barbour in Renaissance Quarterly



Degenhardt's book provides a richly evocative and nuanced way of looking at emergent racial categories, apostasy, and the human body....It brilliantly achieves its primary objective of establishing the continued influence of Catholicism in post-Reformation staging of an embodied Christian response to Islam. The impressive list of plays examined and carefully articulated arguments make it a remarkable piece of scholarship, yet it also manages to remain accessible to a general audience interested in learning more about Anglo-Islamic relations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

--Reviewed by Amrita Sen in Shakespeare Quarterly



Islamic Conversion and Christian Resistance on the Early Modern Stage

Jane Hwang Degenhardt

This critical monograph explores the spectre of Christian conversion to Islam in early modern British drama, linking canonical works by Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Webster with less canonical plays by Massinger, Dekker, and others.

Situating British theatre in a global context, it looks at how East-West power dynamics informed representations of identity, embodiment, and race. In particular, this study examines the stage's treatment of religious conversion as a sexual seduction, showing how gender was a key variable in exposing interconnections between conversion to Islam and racial reinscription. It also focuses on how confessional identities fused into racial categories, to offer a unique approach to discussions of race in the early modern period.

In addition, this study is concerned with how the threat of Christian conversion to Islam was framed within a domestic culture of Protestant reform. It looks at how the Renaissance stage re-empowered surprisingly Catholic models of Christian resistance to Islam and demonstrates how the stage refigured medieval models from saints tales, martyrologies, and romances to address Renaissance concerns about commerce, global politics, and interfaith contact. In effect, this book maps a conjunction between post-Reformation controversies over the embodied nature of Christian faith and the early modern history of race.

Jane Hwang Degenhardt is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is the co-editor (with Elizabeth Williamson) of Religion and Drama in Early Modern England.

Introduction: "Turning Turk" and the Embodiment of Christian Faith and Resistance; 1. Dangerous Fellowship: Universal Spirituality and its Bodily Limits in The Comedy of Errors and Othello; 2. Recycled Models: Catholic Martyrdom and Embodied Resistance to "Turning Turk"; 3. Engendering Faith: Sexual Defilement and Spiritual Redemption in The Renegado; 4. Reforming the Knights of Malta: Male Chastity and Temperance on the Early Modern Stage; Coda: Turning Miscegenation into Tragicomedy (Or Not): Greene's Orlando Furioso.