Conversions

Gender and religious change in early modern Europe

Simon Ditchfield, Helen Smith

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781526107053
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Conversions is the first collection to explicitly address the intersections between sexed identity and religious change in the two centuries following the Reformation. Chapters deal with topics as diverse as convent architecture and missionary enterprise, the replicability of print and the representation of race. Bringing together leading scholars of literature, history and art history, Conversions offers new insights into the varied experiences of, and responses to, conversion across and beyond Europe. A lively Afterword by Professor Matthew Dimmock (University of Sussex) drives home the contemporary urgency of these themes and the lasting legacies of the Reformations.Of interest to scholars of early modern history, literature, and architectural history, this collection will appeal to anyone interested in the vexed history of religious change, and the transformations of both masculine and feminine identity.

Part I: Gendering conversion

1

To piety or conversion more prone? Gender and conversion in the early modern Mediterranean

Eric Dursteler

In 1592, Francesco Mosca, an inhabitant of the Venetian town of Sebenico (modern-day Šibenik, Croatia) on the north-eastern Adriatic coast, converted to Islam, or in the parlance of the day, ‘turned Turk’. He had long had a disreputable reputation throughout the region: this was certainly due, in no small part, to his ‘profession’ of ‘killing every type of man and merchant at sea, depriving them of both their goods and their lives’.¹ The previous year, however, Mosca had carried out a particularly violent robbery, and fearing that he would finally be captured and punished for his life of crime, he fled south across the Veneto-Ottoman frontier to Castelnovo (Herceg Novi, Montenegro), lifted his finger, and recited the shahada, or declaration of faith, in front of two Muslim witnesses. With this simple act, Mosca became a ‘Turk’, or from the Ottoman perspective, was ‘honored by the glory of Islam’.² Though he had declared his conviction that ‘there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the messenger of God’, according to a Ragusan diplomat familiar with the case, Mosca’s motivation in this dramatic act was ‘not due to any devotion he had for the Turkish faith’, but rather was done to save his skin so that he could continue his life of piracy. And, in partnership with several Ottomans from Castelnovo, he had a new boat constructed post-haste to support his larcenous activities.

At the time of his flight and conversion, Mosca left behind a son and a wife in Sebenico, the names of whom are not given in the sources. He appears to have attempted to convince his wife to join him in his new life in Ottoman lands, even to the point of enlisting official sources to inquire into her disposition. She refused his overtures, however, in part because she felt that her husband ‘had abandoned her’. For Mosca’s wife, her husband’s conversion definitively signalled the end of their relationship: she took possession of a small boat and all the merchandise he had left behind in Sebenico as payment towards her dowry, which she clearly doubted would be returned to her.³ And, indeed, while canon law decreed that a woman’s dowry be returned if her husband deserted her, according to Islamic law, conversion of one partner in a marriage annulled the relationship and all associated legal and economic responsibilities.⁴

In an early modern Mediterranean that scholars from Fernand Braudel onwards have depicted as being characterised by ‘the ceaseless circulation’ of people, stories such as that of Francesco Mosca and his family were commonplace.⁵ This was the age of the renegade, a term applied specifically to Christians who ‘rebelled against the faith’ by converting to Islam, though many Muslims and Jews also breached the sea’s religious boundaries and can thus also be classed as renegades.⁶ In the sixteenth century alone, the number of renegades across the breadth of the Mediterranean is estimated to have reached into the hundreds of thousands.⁷ They were so numerous, and those who achieved great wealth and influence were so widely known, that renegades became ‘a sensational subject’, subject to widespread curiosity and ‘anxious fascination’ in the literature of the day.⁸

In its broad outlines, Mosca’s case follows a familiar script that was regularly repeated: a man seamlessly and seemingly without hesitation renounces a superficially held and often barely understood faith in order to advance his personal affairs, while his faithful wife refuses to follow, and is thus abandoned and left in dire circumstances. The region’s archives are replete with similar tales, such as the papal military official from Calabria, Hettor Salem, who deserted his wife, Dorotea, in Venice and headed to Istanbul to seek his fortune,⁹ or the Dalmatian Michiel Marghetich, who was described as having ‘always been fickle and not very trustworthy’, evidenced by his repeated see-saw conversions between Christianity and Islam; the third, and apparently final time, he left behind a pregnant wife.¹⁰

These cases suggest a gendered model of Mediterranean conversion that is buttressed by certain contemporary accounts and has been embraced by modern scholars. In 1630, for instance, the French Trinitarian François Dan, who dedicated his life to redeeming slaves in North Africa, estimated that in Algiers there were 8000 men and 1200 women renegades, and in Tunis 3000–4000 and 600–700, respectively.¹¹ These numbers are broadly in line with Anton Minkov’s findings for the Balkans, where 80 per cent of all converts in his sample were men.¹² In their path-breaking study of renegades, Les chrétiens d’Allah, Bartolomé and Lucille Bennassar examined 1550 individual cases of conversion, of which only a minuscule 59, or under 4 per cent, were women.¹³ Despite the statistical variation, these numbers clearly indicate that in the early modern Mediterranean, conversion was primarily a man’s game.

And in a certain sense it was a game: as was the case with Francesco Mosca, whose conversion was ‘not due to any devotion he had for the Turkish faith’, the motives behind these acts of apostasy do not easily fit the traditional Christian paradigm. The archetype of Christian conversion was St Paul – a sudden, dramatic, and all-encompassing transformation resulting from a numinous encounter with the divine that mystically generated a new person who thereafter lived a transformed life. While other Christian models exist, such as St Augustine’s experience of conversion as a process over time, or the mass conversions of the late classical and early medieval eras, the Pauline paradigm of conversion as a ‘totalizing enterprise’, a ‘process of changing a sense of root reality’, a ‘radical reorganization’ of ‘identity, imagination, and consciousness’, has been enshrined in the Christian world.¹⁴ True conversion, when it occurred, was interior and initiated a ‘mutation of the heart’.¹⁵ Indeed, this model has been projected onto non-Christian contexts, including Islam, and in the process has masked or distorted very different notions of conversion.¹⁶

Unlike Paul or Augustine, however, the conversions of Mediterranean renegade men seem rarely to have been all-encompassing, transformative metamorphoses; rather, they were often acts of desperation or aspiration, religious indifference, or ignorance. Indeed, the term conversion may obfuscate more than illuminate their experiences. The motivations behind this common act of boundary transgression are summarised by the seventeenth-century English traveller Henry Blount: ‘Many who professe themselves Christians, scarce know what they meane by being so; Finally, perceiving themselves poore, wretched, taxed, disgraced, deprived of their children, and subject to the insolence of every Raskall, they begin to consider, and preferre this present World, before that other which they so little understand.’¹⁷ A limited understanding of their birth faith, oppression, poverty, and the hope of better socio-economic conditions in the more fluid Ottoman society were all motivating factors behind Mediterranean conversions.¹⁸

It is not surprising, then, that these were almost unanimously perceived by contemporaries as conversions of convenience, and the men who played the chief roles came in for heavy criticism. One traveller in the region wrote that renegades were ‘for the most part Roagues, and the skum of the people, which being villaines and Atheists, unable to live in Christendome, are fled to the Turkes for succour, and releefe’.¹⁹ Analogous views were widely shared by Ottomans; as one official observed, ‘a pig remains a pig, even if they do cut off its tail’.²⁰ Such views should not obscure the fact that conversions of religious conviction certainly occurred,²¹ particularly when conversion is considered as a dynamic social process playing out over time, rather than a singular event experienced internally and in isolation.²² Indeed, some scholars reject outright attempts to assess the ‘motivation and sincerity’ of conversions, which are ‘extremely hard to gauge from available documentation’, and are ‘embedded’ in ‘modern Christian understandings of intentionality, interiority, and authenticity’.²³ Whatever their intent and however they evolved, these seem for the most part to have been, as Jocelyne Dakhlia has labelled them, ‘opportunistic conversions’ with ‘little place for religious conviction’, and in the Mediterranean, those most likely to enact such a questionable religious metamorphosis were men.²⁴

The other side of the equation in a conversion experience such as Francesco Mosca’s, which the extant documents unfortunately treat only in passing and is just as often glossed over in contemporary scholarship, is that of his wife, who rejected the siren call of conversion and retained her birth faith at a not unsubstantial cost to herself. While we have little insight into her motivations, just as was the case with her husband, her own actions fit a familiar script that aligns with what we instinctively expect of an early modern woman. This widely shared view was articulated most memorably by the Earl of Stirling, who described women as being by nature ‘to piety more prone’.²⁵

The notion that women are more religiously committed than men, and therefore less susceptible to conversion, is deeply rooted. In modern western societies, sociologists of religion have found that ‘women are more religious than men on every measure of religiosity’, this despite the historical misogyny of Christianity and the fact that women continue to be systematically excluded from most positions of ecclesiastical authority. Women’s heightened religiosity has been attributed to, among other factors, their ‘social, economic and physical vulnerability’, ‘different structural locations in society’, and differences in socialisation between men and women. Whatever the cause, popular and scholarly literature still axiomatically posits ‘a strong link between being female and being religious’.²⁶

Historical evidence supporting this view abounds, from the unyielding fidelity demonstrated by early Christian martyrs such as Saints Perpetua, Felicitas, and Thecla,²⁷ to the firm commitment to a religious life of medieval women and girls, often in the face of violent parental and spousal opposition, exemplified by St Catherine of Siena or the mystic Angela of Foligno.²⁸ In the early modern Mediterranean, scholars have argued that, in comparison to men, Coptic women in Egypt were more likely to resist conversion to Islam,²⁹ and Tijana Krstić has shown that, in contrast to narratives about male martyrs in the Ottoman Empire, Christian women who withstand the temptation to convert to Islam are depicted as ‘virtuous . . . [and] steadfast in their religion’.³⁰ In seventeenth-century England, Catholic mothers were considered ‘dangerously influential in preserving the faith through their control of the household and their role in educating their children’,³¹ and similar arguments have been made about women among France’s Huguenots, Scotland’s Roman Catholics, and Crete’s crypto-Christian communities.³²

And it was not just Christian women who were depicted as playing the determining role in the preservation of faith; as David Graizbord discusses in this volume, Jewish women in Iberia were considered by contemporaries as the ‘de facto custodians and principal transmitters’ of Jewish culture, which largely occurred within the domestic sphere. This view has generally been embraced by modern scholars, who have portrayed Jewish women as more resistant to conversion because of their ‘maternal role’ in perpetuating tradition and ‘socializing their children’.³³ The same has been argued for women in the ghetto of Turin and in Egypt.³⁴ Ahmed Bouchareb has contended that Muslim women in Portugal resisted ‘apostasy much longer than their male consorts’, and women who did convert were more likely to be recidivists than men. Many ‘secretly gave their children Islamic names and taught them Arabic and the precepts of Islam, hoping that one day they would escape back to Dar al-Islam’. Indeed, some went so far as to kill living or abort unborn children to avoid their baptism.³⁵

The unique mode of women’s resistance to religious ch...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Lists of figures and tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction – Simon Ditchfield and Helen Smith
• Part I: Gendering conversion
• Part II: Material conversions
• Part III: Travel, race, and conversion
• Afterword – Matthew Dimmock
• Bibliography
• Index