Emotion and Conversion on the Early Modern Spanish Stage

ABSTRACT Historians of the religious culture of early modern Spain have long paid attention to the emotional and sensual valences of their subject. Yet it is only recently that Hispanists have begun to fully exploit the systematic theoretical approaches offered by historians of emotion and the senses. This article examines two literary representations of conversion—one successful and one failed—in order to demonstrate how close attention to seventeenth-century concepts of emotion and sense can help us better understand the social dynamics of conversion and religious experience in the period. Both Lope de Vega’s Bautismo del príncipe de Marruecos and Calderón de la Barca’s Nuevo palacio del Retiro explicitly link conversion to the body’s sensory and emotional capabilities. Though they take quite different approaches, both suggest that physical revelation must precede intellectual enlightenment. Faith was, in their presentations, a matter of the eyes, ears, and heart. The author argues that future scholarship on the religious cultures of early modern Spain must take account of the ways in which contemporary authors paid so much attention to emotion and sensory experience in their depictions of conversion and of religious experience more generally.