Conversion Machines : : Apparatus, Artifice, Body / / ed. by Bronwen Wilson, Paul Yachnin.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter EBOOK PACKAGE Arts 2023
• MitwirkendeR: Burke, Juan Luis,; Dursteler, Eric R.,
• HerausgeberIn: Wilson, Bronwen,; Yachnin, Paul,
• Place / Publishing House: Edinburgh : : Edinburgh University Press, , [2023]; ©2023
• Year of Publication: 2023
• Language: English
• Series: Conversions : CONV
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (384 p.) :; 51 B/W illustrations

Examines how mechanisms of change and conversions harrowed and transformed early modern people and their worldsBrings forward the history of made things and the history of practices as a new way of understanding the social and political dimensions of early modern conversion (mostly religious conversion but also bodily, sexual, and machine-to-human kinds of transformation)Engenders a multidisciplinary approach to conversion as a process of change – including history, art and architectural histories, literary studies, and philosophyFocuses on the 16th and 17th centuries with case studies of conversion machines that operated in England, New Spain, Italy, the Low Countries, France, and islands in the Mediterranean Develops accounts of systems and mechanisms for attracting converts, and for managing, manipulating, and staging conversions Individual chapters focus on literary works such as Hamlet, The Temple by George Herbert, and L’Isle des Hermaphrodites; works of art and architecture by Jacopo Ligozzi and Claudio de Arciniega, and thinkers such as Augustine, Descartes, and LeibnizIndividual chapters focus on spaces, movement, visions, sensory experiences, material, spiritual, and bodily transformations that are highly self-aware and inventive thingsConcludes with a pairing of philosophical chapters on what machines cannot do" and on "human conversion machines"Conversion machines are apparatuses, artfully-fashioned preparations, arrangements, and things that demonstrate processes of change. They are paradoxical things – at once intent on verifying what was invisible, uncertain, and even unknowable, while also acting as sowers of dissimulation. The book does not seek to mechanize conversion. In many ways, conversion and the transformation of the convert will remain ineffable. But we maintain 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, the contributors to the volume consider how early moderns suffered under the mechanisms of conversion, sometimes were able to realize themselves by dint of being caught up in the machinery of sovereignty, invented scores of new, purpose-built conversional instruments, and experienced forms of radical transformation in their own bodies."

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- CONTENTS -- LIST OF FIGURES -- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS -- SERIES EDITORS’ PREFACE -- CONTRIBUTORS -- 1 INTRODUCTION: CONVERSION MACHINES: APPARATUS, ARTIFICE, BODY -- 2 THE CONVERSIONAL POLITICS OF COMPLIANCE: OATHS AND AUTONOMY IN HENRICIAN ENGLAND -- 3 THE SEPULCHRE GROUP: A SITE OF ARTISTIC, RELIGIOUS, AND CULTURAL CONVERSION -- 4 STONY BUNDLES AND PRECIOUS WRAPPINGS: THE MAKING OF PATIO CROSSES IN SIXTEENTH-CENTURY NEW SPAIN -- 5 THE CONVERSION OF THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT: CLASSICAL ARCHITECTURE AND URBANISM AS A FORM OF COLONISATION IN VICEREGAL MEXICO -- 6 MATERIAL AND SPIRITUAL CONVERSIONS: JACOPO LIGOZZI AND THE DESCRIZIONE DEL SACRO MONTE DELLA VERNIA (1612) -- 7 ‘HAERETICI TYPUS, ET DESCRIPTIO’: HERETICAL AND ANTI-HERETICAL IMAGE-MAKING IN JAN DAVID, SJ’S VERIDICUS CHRISTIANUS -- 8 DISORIENTATION AS A CONVERSION MACHINE IN THE ISLAND OF HERMAPHRODITES (1605) -- 9 DYNAMIC CONVERSIONS: GRIEF AND JOY IN GEORGE HERBERT’S MUSICAL VERSE -- 10 THEATRES OF MACHINES AND THEATRES OF CRUELTY: INSTRUMENTS OF CONVERSION ON THE EARLY MODERN STAGE -- 11 BODY OR SOUL: PROVING YOUR RELIGION IN THE EARLY MODERN MEDITERRANEAN -- 12 WHAT MACHINES CANNOT DO: A LEIBNIZIAN ANIMADVERSION -- 13 HUMAN CONVERSION MACHINES: HAMLET AND OTHERS -- INDEX