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Alien Encounters as Conversion Parables
An awestruck Jodie Foster. Over Christmas, before I joined Conversion Narratives, I was familiarising myself with the blog and seeing what I’d be getting myself into (as one does) whilst watching the...
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The Medici Press
In 1584, Cardinal Ferdinando de’ Medici founded one of the world’s first Arabic printing presses in Rome, an enterprise with a clear missionary purpose: to provide a vehicle for spreading the Catholic...
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Update: Magdi Allam
Magdi Cristiano Allam, the Egyptian naturalized Italian journalist and convert from Islam to Catholicism profiled in an earlier post, made a new announcement on Monday regarding his religious...
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Reflections of an intern: creating the Virtue & Vice app
There are days to go until the opening of the exhibition “Virtue & Vice” at Hardwick Hall. This will coincide with the availability of an accompanying app for Apple and Android smartphones. This...
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Holiday Tattoos: Wearing the Mark of Jerusalem
While it was traditional for medieval and early modern pilgrims to acquire pilgrim badges commemorating their journeys — individuals who completed the journey to Santiago de Compostella in Spain, for...
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What’s in a Name? Curating ‘Virtue and Vice’
The first of the four rare painted hangings in the Hardwick Chapel which inspired our exhibition. ©NTPL/John Hammond. On a visit to Hardwick in the summer of 2011, I encountered two striking textiles....
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How do you solve a problem like Hardwick?
It’s been a privilege to work with National Trust staff and volunteers for the ‘Virtue and Vice’ exhibition, and a real thrill to get the occasional peek into areas of the Hall that are usually closed...
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Happy Birthday to the Bard
It’s Shakespeare’s birthday. To celebrate as Shakespeare would have liked, make sure you contemplate your own inevitable decline by listening to Izzy Isgate reading Sonnet 73. Simply click on the link...
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‘Cultural Encounters’ lectures available online
Between January and March, we ran a series of public lectures at the York Medical Society Rooms in York, disseminating the results of our research, and the questions raised by the project. We were...
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An inlaid table, as you’ve never heard it before…
On 13th April 2013, visitors to the High Great Chamber at Hardwick Hall were in for a surpise… ‘Les Canards Chantants’, a talented quartet currently based in York, delighted visitors by singing ‘live’...
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The New Christians of Spanish Naples
We are delighted to announce the publication of Peter Mazur’s new monograph, The New Christians of Spanish Naples, 1528-1671: A Fragile Elite. Peter’s book takes as its topic the teeming port city of...
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A book that converted…
As part of the work of putting together the ‘Virtue and Vice’ exhibition, I got to return to a question that has fascinated me for a long time: women’s reading in the early modern period. Though...
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Public History at Hardwick
As regular readers of this blog will know, the Conversion Narratives team were delighted to welcome Hannah Hogan into our ranks during the spring term. Hannah has written a new blog post, reflecting on...
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Picture of a reading table?
A couple of days ago, I wrote a post about Bess of Hardwick’s reading. What I didn’t mention there was the description of the table on which Bess kept her books. According to the 1601 inventory of...
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‘Go your ways for an Apostata’: the converting Courtesan
van Honthorst, Smiling Girl, a Courtesan, Holding an Obscene Image, 1625 I’m really delighted to have been given the chance to contribute to the Dutch Courtesan project, an all-singing, all-dancing...
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Weaving histories: contemporary textiles at Hardwick Hall
Yesterday, I made another trip to Hardwick Hall to help (well, mainly watch) textile artist Jan Garside and her collaborators install a set of three responses to our research, and to the themes of the...
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An Interview with Jan Garside
Jan Garside, a textile artist, recently completed a set of three responses to our research and to the ‘Virtue and Vice’ exhibition at Hardwick Hall. A couple of weeks ago, I sat down with Jan to talk...
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‘Converted to a cat’
The most famous apocyrphal cat of the Renaissance?**Petrarch’s mummified cat at Casa del Petrarca. In honour of World Cat Day, I did a quick search on the fabulous Early English Books Online to see if...
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Tattoos II
Following on from a post on holiday tattoos in Jerusalem I’ve come across an interesting reference to tattoos and conversion in Nabil Matar’s article ‘‘Turning Turk’: Conversion to Islam in English...
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Narrative Conversions: a Workshop
On 2nd and 3rd June, we will be hosting a workshop on the theme of Narrative Conversions, organised in collaboration with the Early Modern Conversions project. We’ll be led in conversation by Warren...
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