Conversion Machines

Conversion machines are apparatuses, artfully-fashioned preparations, arrangements and things that demonstrate processes of change. They are paradoxical – at once intent on verifying what was invisible, uncertain and even unknowable, while also acting as sowers of dissimulation.
This study does not seek to mechanise conversion. In many ways, conversion and the transformation of the convert will remain ineffable. Instead, this collection maintains that conversion of all kinds must unfold in ecologies that include politics, law, religious practice, the arts and the material and corporeal realms. Shifting the focus from subjectivity toward the operations of governments, institutions, artifices and the body, contributors consider how early modern Europeans suffered under the mechanisms of conversion, how they were sometimes able to realise themselves by dint of being caught up in the machinery of sovereignty, how they invented scores of new, purpose-built conversional instruments and how they experienced forms of radical transformation in their own bodies.

Bronwen Wilson teaches Art History at UCLA where she is the Edward W. Carter Chair in European Art and the Director of the Center for 17th- and 18th-Century Studies at William Andrews Clark Memorial Library. Her research and teaching explore the artistic and urban cultures of early modern Europe (1300–1700), with a focus on space, print, portraiture, landscape and transcultural, material and environmental interactions. Recent publications include two volumes co-edited with Angela Vanhaelen: Making Worlds: Global Invention in the Early Modern Period (2022) and “Making Worlds: Art, Materiality, and Early Modern Globalization”, a special issue of the Journal of Early Modern History (23, nos. 2–3, May 2019), and several articles, such as “Afterword: Ornament and the Fabrication of Early Modern Worlds”, in Bodies and Maps: Early Modern Personifications of the Continents, (eds) Louise Arizzoli and Maryanne Horowitz (Brill, 2020); and “Spiritual and Material Conversions: Federico Barocci’s Christ and Mary Magdalene,” Quid est sacramentum?: On the Visual Representation of Sacred Mysteries in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1700, (eds) Walter Melion, Lee Palmer Wandel and Elizabeth Pastan (Brill, October 2019). Her current book project, “Otherworldly Natures: Lithic Formations, In-Between Spaces, and Early Modern Italian Art”, probes artistic engagement with quarries and riverbeds. She currently serves as Vice President of the Renaissance Society of America.

Paul Yachnin is Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at McGill University. From 2013-2019, he directed the Early Modern Conversions Project (http://earlymodernconversions.com/). His ideas about the social life of art were featured on the CBC Radio series, “The Origins of the Modern Public.” Among his publications are the books, Stage-Wrights and The Culture of Playgoing in Early Modern England (with Anthony Dawson), co-editions of Richard II and The Tempest, and edited books such as Making Publics in Early Modern Europe (with Bronwen Wilson) and Forms of Association. He leads the TRaCE Transborder Project, which will track the career pathways of PhD graduates from universities in Africa, Australia, Canada, China, England, India, the Netherlands, and the USA, will tell the stories of many graduates, and will undertake to create an international mentoring community. He publishes regularly on graduate education policy and academic culture and on how Shakespeare can speak to the challenges of the 21st century.