Becoming Christian: Race, Reformation, and Early Modern English Romance

Becoming Christian argues that romance narratives of Jews and Muslims converting to Christianity register theological formations of race in post-Reformation England. The medieval motif of infidel conversion came under scrutiny as Protestant theology radically reconfigured how individuals acquire religious identities. Whereas Catholicism had asserted that Christian identity begins with baptism, numerous theologians in the Church of England denied the necessity of baptism and instead treated Christian identity as a racial characteristic passed from parents to their children. The church thereby developed a theology that both transformed a nation into a Christian race and created skepticism about the possibility of conversion. Race became a matter of salvation and damnation. Britton intervenes in critical debates about the intersections of race and religion, as well as in discussions of the social implications of romance. Examining English translations of Calvin, treatises on the sacraments, catechisms, and sermons alongside works by Edmund Spenser, John Harrington, William Shakespeare, John Fletcher, and Phillip Massinger, Becoming Christian demonstrates how a theology of race altered a nation's imagination and literary landscape.

Table of Contents:
List of Figures Acknowledgments Introduction: Not Turning the Ethiope White 1. "The Baptiz'd Race" 2. Ovidian Baptism in Book 2 of The Faerie Queene 3. Infidel Texts and Errant Sexuality: Translation, Reading, and Conversion in Harington's Orlando Furioso 4. Transformative and Restorative Romance: Re-'turning' Othello and the Location of Christian Identity 5. Reproducing Christians: Salvation, Race, and Gender on the Early Modern English Stage Afterword: A Political Afterlife of a Theology of Race and Conversion Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Dennis Austin Britton is Associate Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire. His areas of research include early modern English literature, Reformation theology, and race and ethnic studies. In 2012, he received a year-long National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library.

Review :
"What is strikingly original in Britton's work is the underlying insistence on unearthing the ways English theologians and writers made use of a religious motif--baptism--as a coded racial marker."-Margot Hendricks, University of California Santa Cruz "Becoming Christian is an exciting study that offers a theological account of race and racialization in early modern England, and explores the way this theology of race informs the cultural imagination."-Joan Pong Linton, Indiana University