At first glance Fictions of Conversion may strike the reader as oddly subtitled since Jews were expelled from England in 1290. Yet in this volume, Jeffrey Shoulson shows that theologians and churchmen, preachers and poets, dramatists and alchemists turned to Jews and Judaism to understand and explore the nature of conversions—authentic and inauthentic. Native Christian devotion signaled to the English their providential role in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. But confessional shifts in England's official religion—from Anglican to Roman Catholic to the Elizabethan Settlement—along with the subsequent growth in numbers of Puritans, Catholics, and Quakers, among others, served to complicate and undermine a coherent and singular English identity. The Jews—their religion, scriptures, and contested conversions in Spain—provided “fictions of conversion” for writers anxious about English identity. Indeed, such encounters tended to be textual and imagined apart from the few Englishmen who had contact with Jews in the Low Countries and the Levant. Through the Jews English authors indirectly explored their own religion specifically and fractious cultural change as a whole. Such Jewish “fictions of conversion” offered narratives and models that proved productive, provocative, and perilous as English scholars translated and interpreted the biblical text, plumbed the transformation of matter and spirit in alchemy, and measured the dissenting claims of religious enthusiasts.

Shoulson's investigation opens with the multiple meanings of conversion as reflected in the New Testament conversion of the Apostle Paul, the theological legacy of the continental Reformers, and English efforts to make sense of contemporary religious change and authenticity. Even as some conversions were sudden, others were incremental; some appeared fleeting, while others appeared fictitious, feigned conversions designed to conceal one's actual religion, heresy, or treachery. To make sense of this authors such as Richard Hooker, John Foxe, and Thomas Cooper compared confessional shifts and feigned conversions in England to the response of Jews to early Christianity, and even more so to the forced conversions of marronos in Spain. Fictions of Conversion then turns more directly to the interpretation of scripture and how English scholars developed typologies of conversion from the Old Testament narratives of Abraham, Jethro, Naaman, Rahab, and Ruth. Such typologies revealed subtle nuances of conversion and further uncertainties in relation to ethnicity, gender, and ecumenism. In short, the Jews provided scriptural and early modern accounts of conversion that were at the same time decisive and dubious in meaning.

In the final three chapters Shoulson considers other deeply related “fictions of conversion”: linguistic translation, alchemical transformation, and the poetic assessment of religious enthusiasm. In each case, the Jews play a surprising and essential role. In the early modern period translation was itself a form of “conversion” as English texts of the Hebrew Bible and the epics of Homer “raised the question of continuity and discontinuity between Judaism and classical paganism, on the one hand, and early modern England, on the other” (90). Translation meant that the texts and vocabulary of one culture were changed into the literature and concepts of another. Similarly, alchemy, viewed as a Jewish science, intersected with questions about the conversion of matter and conversion of the Jews to Christianity as evidenced in the works of Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Henry Vaughan. Finally, “discourses of conversion” figure prominently in seventeenth-century writings regarding “enthusiasm” and authentic inspiration, on display particularly in John Milton's Paradise Regained. Claims of “inner light” and direct divine inspiration “threatened to disrupt emerging notions of national coherence and identity because they pitted these fictions of individual conversion against the imagined communities that were taking shape amidst the tumult of the English Civil Wars, Interregnum, and Restoration” (15).

Fictions of Conversion is an exceptional example of the subtle work pursued today regarding early modern society, Christianity, and Judaism. Specific case studies increasingly reveal and describe the vivid and varied topography of Jewish-Christian interaction, thus complementing broad and sometimes flat categories like “Anti-Judaism” and “Anti-Semitism.” Jeffrey Shoulson commands a dazzling array of sixteenth and seventeenth-century texts and genres—theological and political, esoteric and scientific, dramatic, and poetic—showing how English authors made sense of religious commitment, national identity, and cultural change through the Jews and Judaism. While the chapter on translation (“Meaning”) stretches the book's thesis to its limits, the chapter on alchemy confirms decisively Shoulson's instincts about “conversion” as both a religious and broadly cultural concern. Indeed, given the ambitious vision of the book, the close reading of sources, and the remarkable connections uncovered, the reader may be brought up short at Shoulson's abrupt ending: surely this book is worthy of a summative and provocative concluding chapter.

One might question the supposedly high degree to which sixteenth and seventeenth-century Englishmen displayed an exceptional anxiety about questions of religious change and thus uniquely sought out the example of the Jewish other. Discerning the difference between true religious devotion, hypocrisy, and heresy has been a perennial theme in Christian literature, though the means of discernment has shifted from time to time. And the Jews and Judaism have long offered a mirror of faith and practice into which Christian authors peered seeking identity and difference. Yet striking in this volume is the sheer number of convergences around the idea of conversion and the various forms of it found in English biblical commentaries, sermons, treatises, poems, and staged productions. Did this pattern appear similarly among the more solid confessional blocks of Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and Roman Catholics on the European continent? Were the Jews central there to such “fictions of conversion”? Or does England stand alone? Additionally, did the English struggle with myriad conversions provide a kind of religious and cultural dexterity that helped Great Britain come to dominate the globe? Such are the avenues of research suggested by Shoulson's substantive and incisive work.