This book explores how theatrical practices shaped the multiplying forms of conversion that emerged in early modern Europe. Each chapter focuses on a specific city or selection of cities including Venice, London, Mexico City, Madrid and Berne. Collectively, these studies establish a picture of early modernity as an age teeming with both excitement and anxiety over conversional activities. Considering the commercial theatre that produced professional dramatists such as Lope de Vega and Thomas Middleton, the book surveys a wide variety of kinds of performances that brought theatricality into formative relationships with conversional practices. As a whole, the volume addresses issues of conversion as it pertains to early modern theatre, literature, theology, philosophy, economics, urban culture, globalism, colonialism, trade and cross-cultural exchange.

This volume asks, how did theatrical practice shape the multiplying forms of conversion that emerged in early modern Europe? Each chapter focuses on a specific city or selection of cities, beginning with Venice, then moving to London, Mexico City, Tlaxcalla, Seville, Madrid, Amsterdam, Zurich, Berne, and Lucerne (among others). Collectively, these studies establish a picture of early modernity as an age teeming with both excitement and anxiety over conversional activity. In addition to considering the commercial theater that produced professional dramatists such as Lope de Vega and Thomas Middleton, the volume surveys a wide variety of kinds of theatre that brought theatricality into formative relationship with conversional practice. Examples range from civic pageantry in Piazza San Marco, to mechanical statues in Amsterdam's pleasure labyrinths, to the dramatic dialogues performed by students of rhetoric in colonial Mexico. As a whole, the volume addresses issues of conversion as it pertains to early modern theatre, literature, theology, philosophy, economics, urban culture, globalism, colonialism, trade, and cross-cultural exchange.