Improbable lives: A One-Eyed Soldier, a Dervish and Other Converts in Early Modern Rome

Please join us for a series of public lectures exploring the findings and implications of our research "Cultural Encounters: Travel, Religion, and Identity in the Early Modern World"

The years between 1550 and 1700 saw the birth of our modern world. The rumbling legacy of the Reformations shaped the social and political landscape of Europe, and drove evangelical missions at home and abroad. Thanks to the trading influence and military prowess of the Ottoman Empire, Europeans were confronted by strange ideas, novel societies, and unfamiliar faiths, as well as sophisticated mathematical and scientific knowledge. Voyages of business and exploration brought travellers into contact with the peoples of the Far East, South Asia, and the Americas.
This lecture series will roam across early modern Europe and beyond, investigating the effects of these turbulent centuries, and their centrality to our own social and cultural inheritance.See further information about the series at: http://www.york.ac.uk/crems/conversion/news/publiclectures/

Lectures will take place in the wonderful surroundings of the York Medical Society, on Stonegate, and will start at 20.00. Refreshments will be provided, and all are welcome to attend.
For directions please see: http://yorkmedsoc.org/how-to-find-us.html

Dr Peter Mazur, Department of History, University of York

The disorienting experience of travel and the complexities of assimilation into a foreign society were common features of the history of Early Modern Europe, but they took on a special meaning in Italy, where an increasingly complex and organized clerical bureaucracy did its best to determine the religion of the men and women who arrived there and convert them to Catholicism, by persuasion or force.  The stories that resulted are full of surprising twists and humorous detail that reveal much about the way religion was lived and experienced in one of the world’s oldest religious capitals.