Performing Conversion: Cities, Theatre and Early Modern Transformations ed. by José R. Jouve Martín and Steven Wittek (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Performing Conversion: Cities, Theatre and Early Modern Transformations ed. by José R. Jouve Martín and Steven Wittek
• Benjamin Easton

José R. Jouve Martín and Steven Wittek, editors. Performing Conversion: Cities, Theatre and Early Modern Transformations. EDINBURGH UP, 2021. 216 PP.

THIS COLLABORATION connecting the fields of literary studies, architecture, history, and media studies presents conversion as an expansive conceptual tool to apprehend the transformations of urban spaces and cultural institutions in the early modern world. It follows on the heels of Ovidian Transversions: Iphis and Ianthe, 1300–1650 (edited by Valerie Traub, Patricia Badir, and Peggy McCracken, 2020) as the second installment of Edinburgh UP's Conversions series, which, in the words of the editors of the series, Bronwen Wilson and Paul Yachnin, "sets out to explore the efflorescence of various forms of conversion and their social, corporeal and material integuments as they played out across early modernity" (ix). The series thus examines conversion in a capacious sense that includes the transformation of people across various religious, political, and economic identity categories as well as the transformation of places through urban renovation projects, the European colonization of the Americas, and the rise of theater as a new form of mass culture. (A third volume, Conversion Machines: Apparatus, Artifice, Body, is forthcoming.) The present collection traces an itinerary through Lima, Venice, Amsterdam, Mexico City, London, Madrid, and Zurich, bringing to light both the ways in which such burgeoning urban centers increasingly made theater and theatrical activity possible and how various theatrical productions and behaviors reflected on and actively shaped early modern conversional experiences.

Chapters 1 to 3 consider conversion not in the theater per se, but in paratheatrical sites such as public squares, urban pleasure parks, and even lecture halls. In chapter 1, "Venice: The Converted City," Iain Fenlon examines the theatrical dimensions of the Piazza San Marco, where both ecclesiastical elites and patricians collaborated in ritualized public performances to consolidate the city's sense of political stability during a time of widespread disease and overseas military conflict. Renovated according to the designs of Florentine architect Jacopo Sansovino (1486–1570), the piazza served as a potent "locus of devotional activity" throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth [End Page 431] centuries (21). Clerics and magistrates worked together to employ the city's large repository of relics (mostly acquired centuries before as spoils brought back from the Fourth Crusade) to stage frequent processions in the piazza. Regardless of just how harmonious the confluence between church and state actually was, Fenlon observes that the process by which Venice became a "converted city" in the late sixteenth century depended on religious, political, and military activities as deeply interdependent phenomena. Certain processions, such as the yearly andata of Santa Giustina honoring the Holy League's victory over the Ottoman Empire at the Battle of Lepanto (1571), "emphasised the indissolubility of religious and civic values by fusing together the political and devotional dimensions of public life" (25). Fenlon's sharp analysis of the interrelations between relics, urban space, and public performance leaves the reader with a greater appreciation of how the renovation projects that transformed the material city (urbs) literally laid the groundwork to alter the format and ultimately the character of Venetians' collective expressions of religious and civic identity (civitas).

Angela Vanhaelen's "Turnings: Motion and Emotion in the Labyrinths of Early Modern Amsterdam" (chapter 2) discusses affective conversions in the context of Amsterdam's Oude Doolhof (Old Labyrinth), a main attraction of the city's sixteenth-century art park. As a highly dynamic, multicursal maze, the Doolhof initially disoriented its participants, already tipsy from drink, as they wandered through its winding pathways. What is more, as they passed by several references to the Cretan labyrinth such as a fountain of Bacchus and Ariadne or a statue of Theseus battling the Minotaur, visitors experienced a host of sensorial shocks from surprise water jets, unanticipated noises, and the uncanny movements of human-like machines. For Vanhaelen, the activation of both the maze itself as well as the "affective involvement of the participants" through their involuntary bodily reactions rendered the labyrinth, itself rife with Ovidian allusions, a space of significant transformative potential (37). After the...