Ex Saulo Paulus, ex persecutore apostolus? The spiritual conversion of Bishop Dantyszek in the light of new sources

Jan Dantyszek był dzieckiem swoich czasów – niewątpliwie przez większą część życia hołdował swobodnym renesansowym obyczajom. Jego sława hulaki i rozpustnika, dyplomaty o licznych kontaktach w rozmaitych, także podejrzanych, środowiskach, następnie zaś surowego biskupa katolickiego w Prusach (pozostającego jednak w dobrosąsiedzkich stosunkach z luterańskim księciem Albrechtem) w powiązaniu z użytą nieco niefortunnie na jego określenie przez Stanisława Hozjusza metaforą przemiany Szawła w Pawła, zrodziła fałszywe mniemanie, jakoby Dantyszek przez długi czas sprzyjał reformacji i dopiero pod wpływem Hozjusza (po przyjęciu go do kapituły warmińskiej w roku 1538) uległ nawróceniu, stając się wojującym katolikiem. To błędne przekonanie stale przewija się w literaturze naukowej, znajdując najpełniejszy wyraz we wprawdzie popularnonaukowej, ale za to jedynej opublikowanej dotychczas drukiem polskojęzycznej monografii Dantyszka.

From Courtesan to Saint

This essay analyzes the viceregal Mexican artist Juan Correa’s painting The Conversion of St. Mary Magdalene, from the late seventeenth century. A depiction of a woman explicitly displaying traits of her sensuality and sexuality in a Mexican viceregal artwork, the painting visually conveys symbolic embodiments of the feminine condition. These embodiments refer to religious penitence, self-reflection, mysticism, and the vita contemplativa. Moreover, I examine the episodic nature of the painting, associating it with feminine devotional practices. The painting’s pictorial configuration apparently relates to the Jesuit theological tradition, specifically to the spatial and embodied representations expressed in the engravings contained in the Adnotationes et meditationes in evangelia (1595), by Jerónimo Nadal. The essay underscores how Correa represented, spatially, a series of notions related to feminine affections, sensibilities, religiosity, and spirituality. Finally, this investigation puts forward the thesis that the painting, as an artifact, prompted devotional prayer, fostering notions such as penitence and self-reflection, and aiming to help its worshippers achieve reformatio or spiritual conversion.

‘Twenty girls in my attic’: Spatial and Spiritual Conversion in L. T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter

This chapter examines L.T. Meade’s A Princess of the Gutter (1895). This novel integrates generic conventions of romance and realism in order to engage in contemporary debates about the settlement movement for its juvenile audience. In its representation of the protagonist’s experience living and working in various forms of settlement housing in London’s East End, the novel explores the degree to which a commitment to religious philosophy was necessary to effect meaningful social change.

Olaudah Equiano

Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, as he was known during his lifetime (b. 1745?–d. 1797), was a writer and polemicist of extraordinary abilities. His Interesting Narrative informs readers that he was born into a ruling-class Igbo family in 1745 and was kidnapped at the age of eleven. He tells readers that he was then sold to Europeans on the Gold Coast and made to endure the dreaded transatlantic Middle Passage to Virginia. After this time, he was sold to Michael Henry Pascal, an officer in the British Royal Navy, who, against Equiano’s will, named him Gustavus Vassa, a name that Equiano used throughout the rest of his life. Traveling with Pascal to England, Equiano was officially baptized, he tells us, in 1759. After his baptism, Pascal recruited Equiano for the Seven Years’ War. Equiano mistakenly assumed that Pascal would free him at the end of the conflict. Instead, Pascal sold him into West Indian slavery. From there, Equiano worked to save enough money and purchase his own manumission in 1766. With his new freedom, Equiano sailed the world, gaining the rank of able seaman, as he traveled across the Atlantic and even to the North Pole. After that harrowing journey, Equiano experienced a spiritual conversion to Methodism in 1774, and grew publicly involved with the antislavery debate, through letters, speeches, and his own Interesting Narrative. He married a white Englishwoman, Susanna Cullen, in 1792, and had two daughters, only one of whom survived to inherit the estate that Equiano left for her when he died on 31 March 1797. Biographer Vincent Carretta suggests that aspects of Equiano’s life story, including his African nativity, may be fabricated, as Equiano’s baptismal record lists him as “a Black born in Carolina 12 years old,” a possibility supported by one ship’s muster logs. Following on Carretta’s research, critics continue to debate important questions about genre, evidence, imagination, authenticity, testimony, and authorship.