Results by title

4 books match the query 'Conversion to Christianity'

cover of Child Martyrs and Militant Evangelization in New Spain: Missionary Narratives, Nahua Perspectives

Child Martyrs and Militant Evangelization in New Spain

Missionary Narratives, Nahua Perspectives

Stephanie Schmidt

University of Texas Press, 2025

Examines the many iterations of a story of child martyrdom in colonial Mexico.

A cornerstone of the evangelization of early New Spain was the conversion of Nahua boys, especially the children of elites. They were to be emissaries between Nahua society and foreign missionaries, hastening the transmission of the gospel. Under the tutelage of Franciscan friars, the boys also learned to act with militant zeal. They sermonized and smashed sacred objects. Some went so far as to kill a Nahua religious leader. For three boys from Tlaxcala, the reprisals were just as deadly.

In Child Martyrs and Militant Evangelization in New Spain, Stephanie Schmidt sheds light on a rare manuscript about Nahua child converts who were killed for acts of zealotry during the late 1520s. This is the Nahuatl version of an account by an early missionary-friar, Toribio de Benavente Motolinía. To this day, Catholics venerate the slain boys as Christian martyrs who suffered for their piety. Yet Franciscan accounts of the boys’ sacrifice were influenced by ulterior motives, as the friars sought to deflect attention from their missteps in New Spain. Illuminating Nahua perspectives on this story and period, Schmidt leaves no doubt as to who drove this violence as she dramatically expands the knowledgebase available to students of colonial Latin America.

[more]
cover of Figures of Conversion: “The Jewish Question” and English National Identity

Figures of Conversion

“The Jewish Question” and English National Identity

Michael Ragussis

Duke University Press, 1995

"I knew a Man, who having nothing but a summary Notion of Religion himself, and being wicked and profligate to the last Degree in his Life, made a thorough Reformation in himself, by labouring to convert a Jew."
—Daniel Defoe, The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719)

When the hero of Defoe’s novel listens skeptically to this anecdote related by a French Roman Catholic priest, he little suspects that in less than a century the conversion of the Jews would become nothing short of a national project—not in France but in England. In this book, Michael Ragussis explores the phenomenon of Jewish conversion—the subject of popular enthusiasm, public scandal, national debate, and dubbed "the English madness" by its critics—in Protestant England from the 1790s through the 1870s.
Moving beyond the familiar catalog of anti-Semitic stereotypes, Ragussis analyzes the rhetoric of conversion as it was reinvented by the English in sermons, stories for the young, histories of the Jews, memoirs by Jewish converts, and popular novels. Alongside these texts and the countertexts produced by English Jews, he situates such writers as Edgeworth, Scott, Disraeli, Arnold, Trollope, and Eliot within the debate over conversion and related issues of race, gender, and nation-formation. His work reveals how a powerful group of emergent cultural projects—including a revisionist tradition of the novel, the new science of ethnology, and the rewriting of European history—redefined English national identity in response to the ideology of conversion, the history of the Jews, and "the Jewish question."
Figures of Conversion offers an entirely new way of regarding Jewish identity in nineteenth-century British culture and will be of importance not only to literary scholars but also to scholars of Judaic and religious studies, history, and cultural studies.

[more]
cover of Parables of Coercion: Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain

Parables of Coercion

Conversion and Knowledge at the End of Islamic Spain

Seth Kimmel

University of Chicago Press, 2015

In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, competing scholarly communities sought to define a Spain that was, at least officially, entirely Christian, even if many suspected that newer converts from Islam and Judaism were Christian in name only. Unlike previous books on conversion in early modern Spain, however, Parables of Coercion focuses not on the experience of the converts themselves, but rather on how questions surrounding conversion drove religious reform and scholarly innovation.
            In its careful examination of how Spanish authors transformed the history of scholarship through debate about forced religious conversion, Parables of Coercion makes us rethink what we mean by tolerance and intolerance, and shows that debates about forced conversion and assimilation were also disputes over the methods and practices that demarcated one scholarly discipline from another.
[more]
cover of The Mortara Case and St. Thomas Aquinas's Defense of Jewish Parental Authority: with Original Documents from the Mortara Case: <i>Pro-memoria, Syllabus, Brevi cenni</i>

The Mortara Case and St. Thomas Aquinas's Defense of Jewish Parental Authority

with Original Documents from the Mortara Case: <i>Pro-memoria, Syllabus, Brevi cenni</i>

Matthew Tapie

Catholic University of America Press, 2024

The Mortara case refers to Pope Pius IX’s 1858 removal of a six-year-old Jewish boy, Edgardo Mortara, from his parents in Bologna, Italy. Six years after Edgardo was born, it was reported that the family’s Christian housekeeper had baptized the boy after he had fallen ill as an infant and was allegedly in danger of death. Since canon law and civil law stipulated that a baptized child must be raised Catholic, Pius IX used his power as head of the papal states to remove the boy. In advocating for the return of the child, the Mortaras submitted to the Vatican a two-part document, which appealed to the teachings of Thomas Aquinas against baptism of Jewish children invitis parentibus (against the will of the parents). The papal counsel’s reply denied the request, citing Aquinas’s teaching to argue that Edgardo’s baptism was valid, and that he belonged to the Church. Today, some Catholic theologians defend or at least excuse the Pope’s decision with appeal to the works of Aquinas. Which side had the correct interpretation of Aquinas’s teaching? And how does this answer impact Catholic theology and Catholic Jewish-relations today? The Mortara Case and St. Thomas Aquinas's Defense of Jewish Parental Authority adjudicates the claims of both sides of the debate through an analysis of Aquinas’s teaching as it is interpreted in the Italian and Latin original documents from the 1858 case, which are housed in the Vatican Apostolic Archives, and reproduced here, with facing English translations, for the first time. Tapie demonstrates that, for Aquinas, Jewish parental rights are an order of the natural law, which Aquinas likened to a spiritualis uterus (spiritual womb). Through the metaphor of the spiritual womb, Aquinas merged the Roman institution of parental rights with the theological concept of the natural law. Tapie concludes by examining baptism invitis parentibus in the current Code of Canon Law with attention to the Second Vatican Council’s teaching on religious freedom and the Jewish people.
[more]