Conversion Machines

Examines how mechanisms of change and conversions harrowed and transformed early modern people and their worlds 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. Paul Yachnin is Tomlinson Professor of Shakespeare Studies at McGill University. From 2013-19, he directed the Early Modern Conversions Project.