Convert

Steeped in religious language, the ‘convert’, as a noun, was a figure of intrigue and fear in the early modern era. The related verb ‘to convert’ applied this idea of change to a range of contexts at a time that saw drastic changes in medicine and natural philosophy. ‘Convert’ and ‘conversion’ related to transformation and alteration, but the confessional split caused by the Reformation, and more frequent English encounters with peoples and polities beyond Europe, meant the ‘convert’ became an important figure in English definitions of their own identities. [1] For the English, encountering other people was a double-edged sword. On one side, these exchanges provided the opportunity for many to fulfil what they saw as their biblically-ordained evangelical responsibility to convert peoples and environments for both the Protestant faith and English state. On the other hand, cross-cultural encounters also placed the English at risk of conversion to other faiths and cultures.

The use of ‘convert’ as a noun first occurs in English in the middle of the sixteenth century. In this instance it described an individual who had been encouraged to embrace and profess a different faith. In 1561, Jean Calvin criticized the Anabaptists and Jesuits who ‘appoint certaine days to their newe convertes, during which they must exercise themselves in penance’ to enter communion.[2] Similarly, Biblical translations described various forms of converts. In the 1599 Geneva Bible, God punishes Israel ‘because they refused to convert’[3], while in the 1611 King James Version, Isaiah prophesied that ‘Zion shall be redeemed with judgement, and her converts with righteousnesse.’[4] By the middle of the seventeenth century, ‘convert’ was not only used to describe and identify individuals who had changed religions but also someone who had shifted their political, legal or even cultural allegiance. The lawyer and MP William Hakewell wrote in 1641 how he considered his ‘former opinion as erroneous’ and did ‘embrace the contrary’, so that he had ‘become a convert’.[5]

After the Reformation, Protestant fears of conversion back to Catholicism, and away from the ‘true doctrine’ of the reformed faith, could happen within the realm as much as beyond it. Because Henry VIII’s break from Rome had unprecedently placed the English monarch at the head both church and state, conversion was a political as well as a spiritual issue, becoming a concern for policy-makers and churchmen alike.[6] Spanish agents of Iberian Counter-Reformation, as well as English Catholics who fostered ties with the Jesuit colleges in Europe, sought to claim converts in their attempt to return England to the fold of the papacy. ‘I hope that Our Lord will blind [the Protestants] and temper the situation’, wrote the Spanish woman Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza from London in 1606, ‘otherwise soon there will be no Catholics left’.[7] The conversion of individuals could have implications on a national or international scale. Carvajal reported that when men and women in the streets of London discussed confessional difference, they also invoked the religion of their rulers, and she expressed a sympathy for James, ‘for he had been left a child without his santly Catholic mother and in the puritans’ hands’.[8] In response to Catholic attempts to drawing converts, Protestants used print and pulpit to proclaim the rightness of their doctrines, often offering staged conversions to reinforce the providentialism of the Protestant order.[9] Once such example is evidenced in the sermon by Anthony Tyrell. A renegade priest and spy, Tyrell converted and reverted at least six times from Protestantism and Catholicism during the 1580s. His sermons in 1589 aimed to ‘publish unto the world yet once again the constancy of my faith’, declaring that ‘I do from my hart … relinquish and abandon the Pope and the sea of Rome so far forth as it maintained Idolatry, favoured superstition, nourished schism and division, taught disobedience both to God and Princes.’[10] ‘I will not the death of a sinner’, the Swiss reformer Theodore de Beze wrote, in a translation by John Stockwood, ‘but I will rather than the sinner convert, repent and live’.[11]

As Carla Pestana argued in Protestant Empire, much of the English zeal to convert came as a result of their desire to compete with the conversion efforts of Catholic Spain in the Atlantic.[12] Early European encounters in the Atlantic and Indian oceans were dominated by the Spanish and Portuguese. In 1588, the Spanish Jesuit missionary José de Acosta argued that the reason for the success of the Iberian nations was that ‘in the holy Scripture it was foretold long before, that this new world should be converted to Jesus Christ by the Spanish nation.’[13] Like many others Europeans, de Acosta believed that it was not only the duty of Spain but also all Catholics to ‘convert many Nations unto the Lorde.’[14] Awareness of Iberian attempts to convert the peoples of America, and of the wealth they had acquired through their commercial expansion, English imperial thinkers sought to use similar methods to legitimize English global expansion, creating a fundamental relationship between the conversion of souls and the conversion of landscapes. In his Discourse Concerning Western Planting (1584), Richard Hakluyt proclaimed that the first aim of western discovery ‘will be greatly for the enlargement of the gospel of Christ, whereunto the princes of the reformed religion are chiefly bound’, but this document was also profoundly influenced by commercial competition with Spain.[15]

Diplomatic and commercial contacts with the Iberian Peninsula, and the translation of works related to the Iberian overseas expansion, the history of the Peninsular kingdoms or Picaresque novels, instigated an interest in England on the status of the Jewish, Muslim and other non-Christian communities who convert to Catholicism under the auspices of the Iberian crowns. Terms such as Marrano, Converso, Morisco or New Christian (Por. Cristão Novo; Sp. Cristiano Nuevo) became somewhat increasingly familiar to readers of Spanish or Portuguese works. The awareness of the existence of Iberian socioreligious groups formed by converts from Islam (Moriscos) and Judaism (Marranos, Conversos) derived not only from an interest on the domestic situation of rival powers such as Portugal and Spain, but on the perception that the Moriscos and Conversos communities, like the Catholic populations of England, represented an ‘enemy within’, a disruptive element which posed a serious threat to social and political unity.[16] Francis Bacon, for example, suggested that the Moriscos, even after their expulsion from Spain in 1609, still ‘hang as a Cloud or Storm over Spain’ due to their religious affinities with the Ottoman Empire or the Sultanate of Morocco.[17] Bacon’s perception of the Moriscos has echoes of Matthew Sutcliffe’s diatribes against the ‘obstinate recusants’ who were depicted as ‘domesticall malcontents’, a feared internal threat ‘secretly reconciled to the pope, and adhere to her enemies’.[18] These similarities between Moriscos, Conversos and Recusants are also well patent, as Gary K. Waite noted, in the translation into English of Philip III’s 1609 edict decreeting the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain[19], a piece of Spanish legislation which was ‘English’d’ to warn ‘the danger that Moriscos presented to Spain, and potentially to England, should any be allowed to settle there’.[20]

The ambiguous religious and political identity of Moriscos and Conversos was also perceived in England as an example of the predisposition of Iberian societies towards racial hybridity. Richard Perceval’s A dictionarie in Spanish and English (1599) presented ‘mestizo’ as the ‘sprung of a mixture of two kinds, as a blacke-Moore and a Christian’, and ‘mulato(a)’ as the son or daughter of ‘a blackmoore, and one of another nation’.[21] Perceval’s definition of these Iberian racial categories suggested thus a perception that religious conversion encouraged or fomented miscegenation. This idea is also present on English and European accounts of the Iberian overseas territories. The English translation of Jan Huyghen von Linschoten’s Itinerario (1598), for example, noted that the Christian population of Goa included a considerable and influential number of Mestiços, the offspring of marriages between Portuguese and Indian women converted to Christianity.[22] Thomas Gage’s account of Spanish America also noted that the Christianization of the New World encouraged cultural and racial hybridizations reflected in a series of racial categories – ‘Mestizos’, ‘Mulattos’, ‘Criolios’ (Criollos), ‘Black-Moors’, etc.[23] Both Linschoten and Gage highlighted that the racial diversity of the Iberian colonial societies was accompanied by the efforts of the inquisitorial courts to impose religious orthodoxy and erase the memory of the heathen practices of the converted indigenous populations.

The term ‘convert’ appeared in the directions given to the Virginia Company in 1609, calling for ‘the conversion and reduction of the people in those parts unto the true worship of God and Christian religion’.[24] The 1620 charter of the New England Company required that the company ‘tended to the reducing and Conversion of such Savages as remain wandering in Desolation and Distress, to Civil Society and Christian Religion.’[25] Early expansion and the perceived paganism of ‘savages’ presented the English with the opportunity to convert Native Americans to Christianity, fulfilling the nation’s God-given responsibility whilst preventing Spanish expansion. The Algonquian woman Pocahontas was one of the highest-profile conversions of the period, used by many in England as a justification for colonizing Virginia and for advertising expansion more broadly. Pocahontas’ conversion, her subsequent marriage to the planter John Rolfe, and the birth of her son Thomas induced the Virginia Company to request that Pocahontas and her family visit England in 1616. In the lead-up to her voyage to England, John Smith wrote to Queen Anne suggesting that it would be crucial for the Queen to meet Pocahontas, as Pocahontas was the ‘first Christian ever of that Nation, the first Virginian ever speak English, or had a child in marriage by an Englishman’ and as such God had made ‘her his instrument’.[26] For Smith, any refusal to meet her would have been detrimental to the fate of the English and Christian mission in Virginia, as ‘her present love to us and Christianity, might turn to such scorn and fury, as to divert all this good to the worst of evil’.[27] Smith’s plan to use Pocahontas to promote the Christianizing of Virginia never came to fruition. Pocahontas fell ill and died in Gravesend in in 1617.[28] Her story is illustrative of the much wider policy of conversion that the English adopted in Virginia, where Algonquian children were taken from their parents and instructed in English customs and religion.

As with Native Americans in the Atlantic, English commercial expansion in the Mediterranean and Indian oceans increased the number of encounters with Muslims, Jewish, and Hindu peoples. For many in England, the role of the commercial companies that operated in the East was conversion alongside commerce. One influential East India Company (EIC) chaplain, Patrick Copland, is mostly remembered or canonized for instigating the first company conversion of an Indian boy in 1614. Returning from India that year with the converted boy, Copland managed to arrange for the company to provide a stipend for the boy to attend school in London to be ‘taught and instructed in religion’ so that God would be ‘soe pleased to make him an Instrument in rounding some of his nation’. [29] One year later, Copland reported on the success of the boy’s education. Since the boy had ‘profited in the knowledge of the Christian religion’, it would benefit the company to hold a baptism ‘publiqielie’ (sic) to celebrate the conversion of the ‘first fruits of India’.[30] However, the conversion of ‘Peter Pope’ did not lead to large-scale change. Edward Terry, chaplain to Thomas Roe in India, bemoaned the inability of the English to convert compared to the success of the Jesuits, writing that only they ‘have liberty to convert, any they can work upon, unto Christianity’. [31] Another EIC chaplain, Henry Lord, wrote about the Hindu and Parsi faiths he encountered in the 1630s. [32] One of the aims of his work was to ensure that ‘good Christians in England’ were able to learn ‘to convert the Heresies of the Heathen’.[33]

Conversion worked in the opposite direction as well. As English subjects ventured further afield, English authorities became increasingly concerned with apostasy or, in the case of encounters with Ottomans, ‘turning Turk’. Regardless of attempts to prevent the conversion of English subjects, it was often the case that English authorities only had the power to address apostacy after it had happened. One such case took place in the spring of 1649, when EIC agent Thomas Breton wrote of his grief to ‘impart unto you a sad story’ of how one man’s conversion to Islam had brought both ‘dishonour to our nation, and (which is incomparably worse), of our Christian profession’.[34] According to Breton, Joshua Blackwell, a company employee at Agra, had converted to Islam and in doing so had been ‘irrecoverably lost’.[35] Breton’s surety that Blackwell was beyond reformation was an acknowledgment of Mughal legal acts, or firmans, which prevented any interaction that would lead to the reconversion of an individual who had become Muslim. Yet despite Breton’s assertion that he was beyond ‘redemption’, Blackwell initiated a series of correspondences in following months that lead to Blackwell’s readmittance into the Company, and to the Protestant community it represented. [36] Even ‘upon the acknowledgment of his sin and promise of perseverance in his Christian profession’, Blackwell still faced problems that would lead to him being sent back to England, as he would be ‘subject to the abuse of every Mahometan that knows your condition’.[37] When it came to apostasy, English authorities abroad provided two services, first to prevent apostasy, and second to clean up after it.

Conversion affected places and spaces as well as souls. Many English travellers lamented the loss or destruction of Christian religious spaces by an invading force or faith. These narratives emphasized the role of external, ‘foreign’ forces in the conversion of sacred places. As with cases of apostasy, Muslims and Catholics were often perceived to be antagonists in accounts where churches were converted to other uses. In one English account of the Ottoman attacks of the Hungarian city of Buda in 1541, the ‘Christian Religion was now by sufferance’, with the ‘Churches...converted to Mosques’.[38] To Christian observers, one of the most horrific repercussions of the siege was the transferral of Christian spaces into Muslim ones, something that occurred with increasing frequency as the Ottoman empire expanded its bounds into Europe and the Mediterranean. Even within the Christian faith, ‘false’ conversions might abound. In the 1690s, an English traveller lamented the condition of Protestants in the Palatinate, where Protestant churches were converted to Catholic ones: ‘at Creutznach the Church that stands upon the Egg Market, they [Catholics] converted to their own use with the Latin Schools’, the money found in the church ‘to pay Popish School-masters, and for Popish uses’. [39] For the author, the conversion of the Protestant church to a Catholic school was doubly troubling. Not only did the loss of the space signify a loss to Protestant advancement, but its conversion to a centre of Catholic education lay the foundations for the future flourishing of Catholicism. These instances highlight the role of the visual, and the built environment, in marking the successes of forms of conversion. This had been underway in the British Isles since the second half of the sixteenth century, as Protestants established regional ascendancy through the dissolution of monasteries, where the building of reformed spaces of worship created a radical reconfiguring of the landscape. To Protestants, the ‘reformation of the landscape’ was acceptable and necessary for the furthering of their doctrines.[40]

Conversion not only meant a switch in faith, but often also signified a change in national identity and allegiance. The legal implications of conversion or possible conversion affected the status of numerous people across the early modern English world. In Britain, several acts, such as the Test Act, Corporation Act, and the Clarendon codes (four Acts introduced by Charles II’s chief minister, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon) imposed harsh legal penalties on recusants and dissenters, discouraging conversion from the state faith. Passed in 1661, the Corporation Act forbade anyone from taking public office who refused to take ‘the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper according to the rites of the Church of England’.[41] Reinforced again in the Test Act (1672), also called ‘An Act for preventing dangers which may happen from Popish recusants’, these acts effectively barred Catholic converts or dissenting Protestant groups, such as Quakers and Baptists, from state offices even if they were English-born.[42] In London and other English towns and cities, this could even prevent individuals from becoming citizens.[43]

In the Atlantic world, authorities also attempted to curtail the legal freedoms that religious conversion had traditionally offered non-Europeans, particularly enslaved Africans. For the enslaved, conversion and baptism had been traditionally seen as a form of manumission, allowing them to legally obtain their freedom and the rights and privileges that came with it. However, during the seventeenth century, a number of English colonies attempted to prevent enslaved men and women from obtaining their freedom through conversion. The Virginia Assembly was the first body in America to legislate this in 1667, declaring that ‘[b]aptism doth not alter the condition of a person as to his bondage or freedom’. [44] Officials in Maryland followed Virginia’s lead, passing an Act for the Encouraging of the Importation of Negroes and Slaves (1671) which also declared that baptism and conversion did not mean manumission.[45] English authorities at home and abroad thus sought to prevent conversion away from Protestantism, but also to restrict the transmission of legal privileges through conversion.

The Reformation, global intervention, and the rise of empirical methods of medical or ‘scientific’ research imbued ‘convert’ with ideas of cultural difference, the transferral of properties, and the potential for transformation. Poets were compared to alchemists in their ability to transform and perfect language. ‘All minerals...thou coldest convert to gold’, acclaimed Arthur Wilson in his commendatory verses to the metaphysical poet John Donne, ‘And with thy flaming raptures so refine, / That it was much more pure then [sic] in the Mine.[46] As an alchemical term, natural philosophers and doctors noted that conversion involved continual change. The results might be welcome — the conversion of an Indian boy to Christianity, or the earth’s conversion of rocks into precious stones — but it might also bring deception or religious degeneration. Alongside spiritual or mental conversion, early modern individuals conceived of conversion as physical, involving invisible and visible changes in character and appearance. As such, a ‘convert’ was a person who underwent profound changes, triumphing over — or failing to combat — the forces of sin and evil.


Engraving of Pocahontas by Simon van de Passe (1616) [47]
Endnotes
1. ‘Convert, adj. and n.’, Oxford English Dictionary [Accessed 15 March 2020].
2. Jean Calvin, The Institution of Christian Religion, trans. by Thomas Norton (London, 1561; STC 4415), p. 276.
3. The Bible and Holy Scriptures (Geneva, 1560), Hosea 11:5.
4. The Holy Bible, conteyning the old testament and the new (London, 1611; STC 2216), Isaiah 1:27.
5. William Hakewell, The libertie of the subject: against the pretended power of impositions (London, 1641; H210), p. 3.
6. Michael Question, Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580—1625 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Arthur F. Marotti (ed), Catholicism and Anti-Catholicism in Early Modern English Texts (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1999); Torrance Kirby, Persuasion and Conversion: Essays on Religion, Politics, and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
7. 'Luisa de Carvajal to Magdalena de San Jeronimo, 3 July 1606', in The Life and Writings of Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, ed. by Anne J. Cruz (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014), p. 225.
8. 'Luisa de Carvajal to Father Joseph Creswell, 29 June 1608', ibid., p. 244.
9. John Foxe, Actes and monuments (London, 1563; STC 11222); Kirby, Persuasion and Conversion, pp. 99-113
10. Anthony Tyrell, A fruitfull sermon preached in Christs-Church the 13 (London, 1589; STC 24474), Aii-v.
11. Theodore de Beze, The treasure of trueth [with additions by John Foxe] (London, 1576; STC 2049), sig. Q6v.
12. Carla Gardina Pestana, Protestant Empire: Religion and the Making of the Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
13. José de Acosta, The naturall and morall historie of the East and West Indies (London, 1604; STC 94), p. 50.
14. Ibid., p. 52.
15. Richard Hakluyt, A Discourse Concerning Western Planting, ed. by Charles Deane (Cambridge: Wilson & Son, 1887), p. 3
16. Jesús López-Peláez Casellas, ‘“Paradoxing” the alien: The Morisco in Early Modern English Texts’, Miscelánea: A Journal of English and America Studies, 46 (2012), 34-36 (pp. 29-52).
17. Francis Bacon, Certain miscellany works of the Right Honorable Francis Lo. Verulam, Viscount S. Alban (London, 1629: STC 1124), p. 75.
18. Matthew Sutcliffe, A briefe replie to a certaine odious and slanderous libel (London, 1600; STC 23453), sig. R2v.
19. W.I., Newes from Spaine The king of Spaines edict, for the expulsion & banishment of more then nine hundred thousand Moores out of his kingdome (London, 1611; STC 22992.7).
20. Gary K. Waite, ‘Empathy for the Persecuted or Polemical Posturing? The 1609 Spanish Expulsion of the Moriscos as Seen in English and Netherlandic Pamphlets’, Journal of Early Modern History, 17:2 (2013), pp. 111-112 (pp. 95–123).
21. Richard Perceval, A dictionarie in Spanish and English (London 1599; STC 1599), pp. 169, 173.
22. Jan Huyghen van Linschoten, John Huighen van Linschoten. His discours of voyages into the Easte & West Indies (London, 1598; STC 15691), p. 53.
23. Thomas Gage, The English-American, his travail by sea and land (London, 1648; Wing G109).
24. 'Second Charter of the Virginia Company, 1609', in Francis Newton Thorpe, Federal and State Constitution, Colonial Charters, and other Organic Laws of the States, territories and Colonies Now or Heretofore Forming the United States of America, Vol. VII (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1909), p. 3800.
25. ‘The Charter of New England (1620)', American History: Documents [accessed 28 January 2017].
26. Karen Ordahl Kupperman (ed), Captain John Smith: A Select Edition of His Writings, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), pp. 69-71.
27. Ibid., p. 71.
28. Karen Ordahl Kupperman, Indians and English: Facing Off in Early America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000), pp. 199-203.
29. '19 August 1614', British LIbrary, IOR B/5; Neill, Memoir of Rev. Patrick Copland, pp. 13-14; William Foster (ed), The Voyage of Thomas Best to the West Indies, 1612—1614 (London; The Hakluyt Society, 2010), xx.
30. '18 July 1615', British LIbrary, IOR B/5, Ibid.
31. Edward Terry, A Voyage to East-India (London, 1655, Wing T782), p. 446.
32. Henry Lord, A Display of two forraigne sects in the East Indies (London, 1630; STC 16825).
33. Ibid., sig. P3r.
34. 'President Breton and Messrs. Merry, Pearce and Oxenden at Swally Marine to the Company, 5 April, 1649', in The English Factories in India, 1618—1669, Vol. VIII, ed. by William Foster (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1896-1902), p. 260.
35. Ibid.
36. 'Joshua Blackwell at Agra to the President and Council at Surat, 14 February 1650', in English Factories, Vol. VIII, p. 299.
37. 'Instruction for President and Council at Surat to Richard Davidge, Proceeding to Court, 7 March 1650', ibid., p. 302; The Rev. William Isaacson at Surat to Joshua Blackwell [at Agra], 7 March, 1650', in ibid., English Factories, Vol. VIII, p. 304.
38. A.B., A letter to a friend being an historical account of the affairs of Hungary (London, 1684 Wing B17), p. 2.
39. An Account of the present condition of the Protestants in the Palatinate in two letters to an English gentleman (London, 1699, Wing A336), p. 10.
40. Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
41. 13. Car. II. st.2 c. 1.
42. 21. Car. II. c. 2.
43. Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500—1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), pp. 86-8.
44. ‘An Act declaring that baptisme of slaves doth not exempt them from bondage (1667)', in The Statutes at Large: Being a Collection of all the Laws of Virginia, from the First Session of the Legislature in the Year 1619, Vol. 2, ed. by William Waller Hening (New York, NY: R & W Bartow, 1823), p. 260.
45. Jeffrey K. Sawyer, ‘English Law and the “Rights of Persons” in Early Maryland’, in Order and Civility in the Early Modern Chesapeake, ed. by Debra Meyers and Melanie Perreault (Lanham, MA: Lexington, 2014), p. 89.
46. John Donne, Poems. By J[ohn] D[onne] (London, 1633; STC 7045), sig. Eee3v.
47. Engraving of Pocahontas by Simon van de Passe (1616)
Usage Examples
'Many say and affirme, that in the holy Scripture it was foretold long before, that this new worlde should be converted to Jesus Christ by the Spanish nation'