Subtheme:
Converted Bodies in Medieval Literature

Conversion narratives often lead to transformations of the body: its appearance, affiliations, actions, and  visibility. Scenes of conversion become sites of celebration, resistance, and violence. This subtheme invites  panels to consider how medieval texts and artifacts conceptualize and stage conversion as a process inscribed on  and through the body. This thread interrogates the medieval body in all its artistic representations with the  following caveat: representation does not exhaust lived experience. Manuscript illustrations, poetic descriptions,  and theatrical performances of medieval bodies rely on aesthetics to convey culturally specific meaning.  

Consequently, how does a racialized, Christianized gaze influence representations and perceptions of non Christian bodies? Alexander the Great’s expeditions to India, for example, illustrate foreign men and women by  excessive “hairiness,” thus conflating this visual characteristic with the stereotypical unruly behaviour of that  people. Dog-headed figures populate a fifteenth-century manuscript of Mandeville’s Travels; these Cynocephali  have rearranged human parts. Medieval travel literature relies on narrative and visual distortions of “others” as a  means of projecting an epistemology against the non-Christian world. How do these representations contribute  to strategies of race-making? More importantly, what happens when these religious and racial categories become  unstable? 

In other words, conversion narratives invite questions about the relationship between religion and race: in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, the bodily desecration and restoration of the Eucharist catalyze the Jewish  characters’ conversion to Christianity, emphasizing both doctrinal authority and visual evidence of bodily  transformation. Feirefiz, the biracial, non-Christian half-brother of Parzival in Wolfram von Eschenbach’s  Parzival, embodies religious and racial difference; both black and white and described “like a magpie,” his  appearance does not change upon his conversion to Christianity––suggesting that conversion could grant  spiritual inclusion without completely erasing bodily difference. Conversely, in other texts, spiritual revelation  corresponds with bodily transformation. In the Cycle of Guillaume d’Orange, Queen Orable’s skin whitens  upon baptism. In The King of Tars, the lump-child’s baptism grants him human form and new life. 

Discourses of conversion subvert and affirm gender binaries in medieval culture. Saints’ lives such as the Life of  St. Barbara and the Life of Christina of Markyate depict female bodies resisting conversion and the social  constraints that accompany it: sometimes, refusing marriage leads to martyrdom. Meanwhile, displays of hyper masculinity stimulate conversion and promote Christian procreation; a knight’s geographical and sexual  conquest of non-Christian bodies and territories perpetuates fantasies of Christian colonial dominance. 

This subtheme encourages submissions that engage with critical studies of race, gender and sexuality studies,  affect theory, and phenomenology as they relate to medieval objects, broadly construed.  

 

Panels and papers might explore:  

● Scenes of conversion in drama, romance, hagiography or travel narratives
● Saint’s lives & conversion narratives 
● Scenes of resisting conversion 
● Encounters in travel narratives 
● Historical accounts of conversion  
● Conversion as transformation, transgression, or translation

● Racialized bodies & conversion (representations of “renewal,” or “rebellion”)

● Iconographical representations of conversion 
● Conversion & disfigurement