This remarkable book inverts the well-known “turning Turk” paradigm to explore the obstacles that shaped the possibility of turning Christian in Protestant England. In Britton’s story of race and religion, as Protestant theologians moved to deny the magical power of baptism to transform nonbelievers into Christians — a possibility celebrated in the infidel-conversion motif central to Catholic romances — they were forced to “reconceptualize how Christian identity originates in the individual” (8). They did so by construing religion — specifically salvation — as transmitted by parent to child through bloodline. If this move protected unbaptized English infants from damnation, it also served to block Christian conversion for most infidels — especially Turks and Jews.
This shift in sensibility, Britton argues, was enabled by Protestant rewritings of Ariostan romance and its telltale motif: infidel conversion. His chapters revisit literature that has become canonical fare for discussing race, religion, and difference but through new angles. After a rigorous first chapter demonstrates the coupling of salvation and lineal identity by English Protestant theologians, Britton reads book 2 of Spenser’s Faerie Queene and uncovers an “anti-sacramental poetics” (72) that denies baptism and allegory the power to transform the “indelible marks of originary identity” (79). In the depravity of a Grill or Acrasia, Britton sees Spenser securing a form of racial purity for England not unlike Spain’s limpieza de sangre (87). His reading is hindered by not fully inhabiting the logic of temperance as a virtue valuing balanced mixture rather than purity. Nor can his account explain why Guyon believes Ruddymane worthy of nurture if his father’s sins make him unrecoverable. Spenser was too outraged by patterns of degeneracy in Ireland to embrace Spain’s faith in pure bloodlines. I sense that Britton’s readings of Spenser’s poetics of difference, while compellingly attentive to the absence of Ariostan conversion, would be enriched by a closer look at the epic’s Irish subtexts.
In chapter 3, Britton discovers a chastened voice of reform in the queen’s notoriously subversive godson, John Harington. Positioning his translation of Orlando Furioso alongside biblical exegesis, he reveals Harington’s use of paratextual materials to “govern readers’ interpretations” and to compartmentalize characters by faith. Notably, Ariosto’s Saracen knight, Ruggiero, reappears as a European Christian, while his conversion transmutes into an allegory of a Christian’s battle with sin. Erasures of Ariostan alterity and transformation thereby abound in this Reformed romance.
The fourth chapter, which approaches Shakespeare’s Othello through competing traditions of romance, is the richest in the book. In a wonderfully open-ended engagement with the stage’s sole Christian Moor, Britton swims against critical currents, emphasizing Othello’s belonging in Venice and the obstacles Iago faces in gaining traction for his racist rant. This is because Venice, as a city-state seeking to absorb “imperial outposts” (130), is aligned with the romance values that define Othello: movement and transformation. Only on the island of Cyprus does the telos of Greek romance — its interest in restoring “originary identities” (133) — gain dominance. Misogyny here replaces racism in driving Othello to revert to what is “presumably his prior Muslim identity” (114). By sabotaging Othello’s marriage, the sign of Christian salvation, Iago undoes his baptism. Although Britton’s argument finesses the possibility that Othello may not have been a convert to Christianity, since his conversion is never mentioned in the play, his reading admirably captures how Shakespeare reverses the central ritual of Catholic romance whereby love catalyzes conversion. For Britton, this move to restore a prior identity is the signature feature of Shakespearean romance.
Only in dramatic tragicomedy does Britton find a qualified affirming of Ariosto’s transformative romance and infidel conversion on the Renaissance stage. Notably, plays like Merchant of Venice, The Island Princess, and The Renegado allow for the conversion of an infidel, but on strictly gendered terms: only infidel women can be absorbed into the Christian fold. Moreover, it is no longer sufficient that these female characters profess their love for a Christian man. They now must embrace martyrdom as the indisputable sign of their Christian faith.
Britton’s book serves as a model of intersectional approaches to early modern race, animating connections among skin color, bloodline, faith, and geography. It might be said that Galenic humoralism deserves greater attention in an account foregrounding faith and bloodline, not least because the move to “ground” Christian identity in “biology” may not have been as secure as Britton implies. As one of the four humors, blood was fluid, malleable, and fungible, belying its modern association with a fixed genetic code, and suggesting the need to historicize such biological concepts. But these are quibbles when held beside what Becoming Christian has accomplished: an ambitious march across the vast fields of romance and sacramental theology on the path to discovering the exclusions performed in the name of a “reformed” Christianity. The journey is exhilarating and Britton a remarkably enlightened guide.
