Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England. By Jeffrey S. Shoulson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 266 pp. $65.00 cloth.

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England . By Jeffrey S. Shoulson . Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press , 2013. 266 pp. $65.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesAt first glance Fictions of Conversion may strike the reader as oddly subtitled since Jews were expelled from England in 1290. Yet in this volume, Jeffrey Shoulson shows that theologians and churchmen, preachers and poets, dramatists and alchemists turned to Jews and Judaism to understand and explore the nature of conversions--authentic and inauthentic. Native Christian devotion signaled to the English their providential role in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But confessional shifts in England's official religion--from Anglican to Roman Catholic to the Elizabethan Settlement--along with the subsequent growth in numbers of Puritans, Catholics, and Quakers, among others, served to complicate and undermine a coherent and singular English identity. The Jews--their religion, scriptures, and contested conversions in Spain--provided "fictions of conversion" for writers anxious about English identity. Indeed, such encounters tended to be textual and imagined apart from the few Englishmen who had contact with Jews in the Low Countries and the Levant. Through the Jews English authors indirectly explored their own religion specifically and fractious cultural change as a whole. Such Jewish "fictions of conversion" offered narratives and models that proved productive, provocative, and perilous as English scholars translated and interpreted the biblical text, plumbed the transformation of matter and spirit in alchemy, and measured the dissenting claims of religious enthusiasts.Shoulson's investigation opens with the multiple meanings of conversion as reflected in the New Testament conversion of the Apostle Paul, the theological legacy of the continental Reformers, and English efforts to make sense of contemporary religious change and authenticity. Even as some conversions were sudden, others were incremental; some appeared fleeting, while others appeared fictitious, feigned conversions designed to conceal one's actual religion, heresy, or treachery. To make sense of this authors such as Richard Hooker, John Foxe, and Thomas Cooper compared confessional shifts and feigned conversions in England to the response of Jews to early Christianity, and even more so to the forced conversions of marronos in Spain. Fictions of Conversion then turns more directly to the interpretation of scripture and how English scholars developed typologies of conversion from the Old Testament narratives of Abraham, Jethro, Naaman, Rahab, and Ruth. Such typologies revealed subtle nuances of conversion and further uncertainties in relation to ethnicity, gender, and ecumenism. In short, the Jews provided scriptural and early modern accounts of conversion that were at the same time decisive and dubious in meaning.In the final three chapters Shoulson considers other deeply related "fictions of conversion": linguistic translation, alchemical transformation, and the poetic assessment of religious enthusiasm. In each case, the Jews play a surprising and essential role. In the early modern period translation was itself a form of "conversion" as English texts of the Hebrew Bible and the epics of Homer "raised the question of continuity and discontinuity between Judaism and classical paganism, on the one hand, and early modern England, on the other" (90). …