The Leiden University Institute for Cultural Disciplines
has great pleasure in inviting you to a
Book Launch
to mark the publication of
The Turn of the Soul:
Representations of Religious Conversion
in Early Modern Art and Literature
Edited by
Lieke Stelling, Harald Hendrix, and Todd Richardson

Tuesday 21 February, 17.00
P.N. van Eyckhof 3
Drinks and snacks will be served
All welcome!
The religious upheavals of the early modern period and the fierce debate they unleashed about true devotion gave conversion an unprecedented urgency. With their richvariety of emotive, aesthetic and rhetoric means of expression, literature and the visual arts proved particularly well-adapted means to address, explore and represent the complex nature of conversion. At the same time, many artists and authors experimented with the notion that the expressive character of their work could cultivate a sensory experience for the viewer that enacted conversion. Indeed, focusing on conversion as one of early modern Europe’s most pressing religious issues, The Turn of the Soul demonstrates that conversion cannot be separated from the creative and spiritual ways in which it was given meaning.
Contributors include Mathilde Bernard, John R. Decker, Xander van Eck, Shulamit Furstenberg-Levi, Lise Gosseye, Chloë Houston, Philip Major, Walter Melion, Bart Ramakers, E. Natalie Rothman, Alison Searle, Lieke Stelling, Jayme Yeo and Federico Zuliani.