- Friday, October 21, 2016: Ryan McDermott, University of Pittsburgh, “St. Margaret Clitherow’s Hand: A Case Study in the Incorruptibility of Modernity,” Carpenter Room, 249 Rubenstein Library, 4:30pm.
One odd thing about incorruptible flesh is that it is clearly undergoing some kind of decay. “In the twinkling of an eye,” Paul told the Corinthians, “the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed.” According to the Glossa ordinaria, the incorruptible body subsists “without diminution of its parts.” But you might not want to shake St. Margaret Clitherow’s incorrupt hand. Her flesh is still moist—preserved, we are told, by her sanctity—yet “diminished” is precisely the word to capture the hand’s wizened defiance of death. Every incorruptible saint is diminished. Yet it could be argued, following Julian of Halicarnassus, that what remains of the diminished hand is St. Margaret’s resurrected “spiritual body,” and what has decayed away is the corruptible flesh of this age. Decay as conversion; conversion as sanctification. These reflections are particularly pertinent to the hand of St. Margaret Clitherow, the young wife and mother of York who was pressed to death under “seven or eight hundredweight” of stone in 1586. An adult convert to Catholicism, St. Margaret steadily refused to cooperate with civil-religious authority and thereby performed a powerful argument for hardline recusancy. Her hand surfaced only in the eighteenth century, when it could safely function as a semi-public sign of the hope of the resurrection. Before that, it was hidden. This paper meditates on the hidden incorruption of St. Margaret’s hand in order to inquire about the pace and visibility of conversion in early and late modernity.
- Friday, February 26, 2016: Luke Bretherton, Duke University, “Neither Metamorphosis, nor Evolution, nor Emergence: On the Temporal, Moral and Political Significance of Conversion,” Carpenter Room, 249 Rubenstein Library, 4:30pm.
Luke Bretherton is Professor of Theological Ethics in the Duke Divinity School and Senior Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics. Ethics entails a claim that we can move from the world as it is to the world as it should be. It thus entails some notion of change. Change can be conceptualized in a variety of ways, notably in terms of metamorphosis, emergence, evolution, and conversion. Each of these conceptions has been taken up in one way or another in art, literature, philosophy, and theology. This lecture will offer exploratory reflections on conversion as a way of thinking about moral and political change. It will consider what conceptual work conversion might do to develop a more holistic vision of transformation that is alert to the intersection of the cure of the soil, the cure of the soul, and the cure of the city, as well as to how meaningful change involves attending to the interdependencies between the structure of memory, feeling, and relationships.
- Friday, April 1, 2016: David Como, Stanford University, “Occult Mysticism and Religious Transformation in Seventeenth-Century England,” Carpenter Room, 249 Rubenstein Library, 4:30pm.
In 1637, the London cutler Giles Creech approached the authorities with detailed information regarding the sectarian underworld seething below the surface of the city. Claiming to have been a professor of “fourteen severall religions” during his youth, Creech’s lurid story at one level appears as a case of conversion run amok, a tribute to the farcical nature of sectarian enthusiasm, in which a young spiritual wanderer flitted giddily from error to error. Later historians have accordingly been skeptical of Creech’s tale of Familist and antinomian cells buried in the alleys and shops of the city. This paper examines Creech’s allegations, excavating new manuscript evidence that corroborates, and considerably amplifies, the specific details of his information. More broadly, the paper seeks to use the case of Giles Creech to explore the process through which the small, secretive religious underworld of pre-civil–war London mutated, under the pressures of war and political crisis, into the celebrated world of revolutionary sectarian puritanism, made familiar in Christopher Hill’s World Turned Upside Down. It thus uses one of the early Stuart period’s stranger and more implausible stories of conversion as a vehicle for thinking about broad religio-cultural changes and transformations in seventeenth-century England.
