The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England by Holly Crawford Pickett (review)

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• The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England by Holly Crawford Pickett
• Arthur F. Marotti (bio)

Holly Crawford Pickett. The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024. Pp. x + 264 + 8 b/w illus. $65.00 hardcover, $65.00 eBook.

This study departs from the usual explanations of serial conversions as acts of opportunism, unreliable products of emotional experiences, or problematic public gestures meant to convince both authorities and general audiences of their authenticity. The author announces the aims of her study at the start: “I use the triad of conversion, theatricality, and natural philosophy to argue that multiple converts challenge and even change the scholarly view of early modern spirituality and do so in several critical ways” (17).

Chapter 1 deals with the serial convert Anthony Tyrrell, who used the literary forms to which other converts resorted to convince others of the sincerity of their religious change: the “motives” tract, the recantation sermon, and autobiographical account. The problem is that, although Tyrrell insisted on his own sincerity, he was viewed as a hypocrite. His most dramatic moment was when, in supposedly delivering a sermon recanting his Catholic beliefs, he attacked the established church and, when dragged from the pulpit, scattered copies of his sermon, which found its way into print. John Nichols, another serial convert, converted to Catholicism in 1577, but on his return from Rome was imprisoned before renouncing his Catholicism, serving the English government as an informer. The religiously indeterminate play, Nathaniel Woodes’s The Conflict of Conscience, based on the life of Francis Spiera, who renounced his Protestantism under papal pressure, “questions whether reconversion after apostacy is even possible” (42). It has two endings: in the first “the protagonist dies unrepentant” (45) and is a reprobate; in the second he becomes a triple convert. This play, Pickett suggests, “might have unsettled both authorities and readers alike” (50).

Chapter 2 concentrates on William Alabaster, the Protestant and Catholic uses of the example of St. Augustine, and the “motives” genre. Alabaster, the author claims, “reserves a place for the theatrical as well as the polemical, within the devotional” (52). She claims that both Augustine’s Confessions and Alabaster’s Conversion “narrate the act of reading in an uncommonly dramatic fashion, one that suggests an intimate connection among reading, performance, and conversion” (54). Like Augustine, who experienced a sudden conversion after reading an account of the life of St. Anthony, Alabaster had a surprising “flash of insight, the overwhelming sense of illumination and transformation” (77) while [End Page 391] he was reading a book, William Rainold’s defense of the Catholic translation of the New Testament. Whether this change was convincing to readers is debatable.

Chapter 3, on Elizabeth Cary and William Chillingworth (who is the villain in the biography of her by her daughter), deals with the question of sincerity in both authors. The first insisted on the truth of her experience, while the second followed the advice of St. Paul, who said he was “all things to all men” and accepted the necessity of dissimulation. In The Tragedy of Mariam, Cary, who for twenty years had periods of recusancy and conformity, rejected the charge of insincerity and, like her daughter, took “great pains to portray their protagonists as unwavering and unfeigned” (79). Alluding to the sociopolitical situation following the Gunpowder Plot and the Oath of Allegiance controversy, which caused many Catholics to practice “Nicodemism” in using occasional church attendance to protect themselves and prove their loyalty, Pickett connects the prejudice against women for being inconstant with the “changeability and duplicity” (82) of serial converts. Cary’s motto “Be and be seen” is meant to assert the authenticity of her religious commitment to Catholicism. In Caroline England, when there were many conversions to Catholicism, such as that of the Duke of Buckingham’s mother, it was important both for Cary and her daughter to assert the authenticity of religious conversion.

The interesting thing about Pickett’s treatment of Chillingworth is her perception of an “ecumenical potential” (100) in him, especially in his The Religion of Protestants, which accepts the need for accommodation and dissimulation. In “privileg[ing...