Author: Calvin B. Kendall File Type: pdf This debut volume in the new series Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History brings a comparative approach to what, in recent years, has been a hotly debated topic within and across a number of academic disciplines conversion to Christianity. These debates register the challenges inherent in attempting to understand a transformation that was at once personal and collective - a matter of inner conviction and outward conformity. The essays in this volume range from the late antique Middle East to medieval Western and Eastern Europe from early modern Asia to the Americas and islands in the Central Pacific. Collectively, the ten authors encourage consideration of the conversion phenomenon comparatively across time and space. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, Prince of Asturias Professor the History at Tufts University, frames the essays in a broader global perspective in light of the two other major world religions, Islam and Buddhism, in his Prologue, while John M. Headley, Distinguished University Professor, University of North Carolina, considers the various conversion processes and their broader impact within the cultural transformation of the societies involved, foreshadowing the uncertain extension of the universal jurisdiction of humanity ... to the peoples of the globe that is one of the transformative processes of the 21st century.The Center for Early Modern History (CEMH), established nearly a quarter-century ago at the University of Minnesota, is a major center for the study of the early modern world (ca. 1350-1800) from a comparative perspective. This period is of vital interest to scholars in a variety of disciplines and it is the essential background to understanding global interactions in the modern world. Minnesota Studies in Early Modern History is a natural outgrowth of CEMHs mission to encourage interaction and collaboration among and within the scholarly community and to disseminate the results of that collaboration to the wider audience beyond academe.ReviewConversion to Christianity assembles essays dealing with conversion to Christianity in ten societies, ranging chronologically from the fourth to the nineteenth centuries and geographically from Constantinople, created by Emperor Constantine to be a Christian city, to the Mariana Islands, converted by Spanish Catholic missionaries. The quality of these essays is high, and they deal in comparative fashion with significant issues....The authors, authorities in their areas of specialization, illustrate how this package functioned in the minds and behaviors of elites and missionaries, and they demonstrate its limitations on the ground. Several writers query the great mantop-down model of missionary expansion.--Alan Kreider, International Bulletin of Missionary Research About the AuthorCALVIN B. KENDALL, Morse-Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of English Emeritus (University of Minnesota), is an Associate of the International Center of Medieval Art. He has edited Bedes De arte metrica and De schematibus et tropis for the Corpus Christianorum, and is author of Bede On Geniesis The Allegory of the Church Romanesque Portals and Their Verse Inscriptions The Metrical Grammar of Beowulf and Bedes Art of Poetry and RhetoricOLIVER NICHOLSON, recipient of the Arthur Red Motley Exemplary Teaching Award, is Associate Professor of Classical and Near Eastern Studies (University of Minnesota). Author of many articles on the Christian polemicist Lactantius and other topics concerning the history of, and history of ideas in, Late Antiquity, he is editor of the Oxford Dictionary of Late Antiquity.WILLIAM D. PHILLIPS, JR., Professor of History (University of Minnesota) and CLA Scholar of the College, is a corresponding member of Spains Real Academia de la Historia. Director of the Center for Early Modern History from 2001 to 2008, his books Spains Golden Fleece and The Worlds of Christopher Columbus, co-authored with Carla Rahn Phillips, were awarded the American Historical Associations Leo Gershoy Award and the Spain in America Prize, respectively.MARGUERITE RAGNOW, currator of the James Ford Bell Library and member of the graduate faculty in History (University of Minnesota), is managing editor of the journal Terrae Incognitae. Among her publications is Religion and the Early Modern State Views from China, Russia and the West, which she co-edited for the Cambridge series Studies in Comparative Early Modern History.