Take Up and Read: The Convert and the Book

Abstract

This chapter charts conversion’s intimate relationship with reading. This includes exploring evidence for the various books, scriptural and otherwise, which are identified by converts as having precipitated their conversion experiences; analysing narratives in which converts ascribe a change in their soul to a change in their reading habits; and considering the implied utility of conversion texts themselves, and their writers’ construction of an imagined readership. I argue that converts not only demonstrate an interest in the religious efficacy of different texts, but display an awareness that their own conversion account could potentially enact a similar change in the reader. In arguing for conversion’s prominent position within a transformative reading culture, the chapter provides a context for the galvanising potential of the rhetorical strategies adopted by conversion narratives.