Introduction -- "The Jews perverted and the Gentiles converted" : confessions and conversos -- "Thy people shall be my people" : typology, gender, and biblical converts -- "The meaning, not the name I call" : converting the Bible and Homer -- Alchemies of conversion : Shakespeare, Jonson, Vaughan, and the science of Jewish transmutation -- Conversion and enthusiasm : radical religion and the poetics of Paradise regained
Summary
This book investigates the anxieties produced by the rapid and erratic religious, political, and cultural transformations in early modern England, which were often given shape in poetry, plays, and translations by the figure of the Jewish converso. The author argues that the vagaries of religious conversion were more readily negotiated when they were projected onto an alien identity - one of which the potential for transformation offered both promise and peril, but which could be kept distinct from the emerging identity of Englishness: the Jew
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 231-253) and index
