Simon Ditchfield & Helen Smith 
Conversions 
Gender and religious change in early modern Europe

Notes on contributors
Introduction – Simon Ditchfield and Helen Smith
Part I: Gendering conversion
1 To piety or conversion more prone? Gender and conversion
in the early modern Mediterranean – Eric Dursteler
2 The quiet conversion of a ‘Jewish’ woman in eighteenthcentury
Spain – David Graizbord
3 ‘A father to the soul and a son to the body’: gender and
generation in Robert Southwell’s Epistle to his father –
Hannah Crawforth
4 Gender and reproduction in the Spirituall experiences –
Abigail Shinn
Part II: Material conversions
5 ‘The needle may convert more than the pen’: women
and the work of conversion in early modern England –
Claire Canavan and Helen Smith
6 Uneven conversions: how did laywomen become nuns in the
early modern world?– Elizabeth A. Lehfeldt
7 Domus humilis: the conversion of Venetian convent
architecture and identity – Saundra Weddle
8 Converting the soundscape of women’s rituals, 1470–1560:
purification, candles, and the Inviolata as music for
churching – Jane D. Hatter
Part III: Travel, race, and conversion
9 Narrating women’s Catholic conversions in seventeenthcentury
Vietnam – Keith P. Luria
10 ‘I wish to be no other but as he’: Persia, masculinity, and
conversion in early seventeenth-century travel writing and
drama – Chloë Houston
11 Turning tricks: erotic commodification, cross-cultural
conversion, and the bed-trick on the English stage,
1580–1630 – Daniel Vitkus
12 Whatever happened to Dinah the Black? And other questions
about gender, race, and the visibility of Protestant saints –
Kathleen Lynch
Afterword – Matthew Dimmock