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  • Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic by Ryan Szpiech
  • Emmanuel Ramírez-Nieves (bio)
Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic. By Ryan Szpiech. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 328pp. Cloth $59.95.

In the second part of Mateo Alemán’s Guzmán de Alfarache (1604), the rogue Guzmán tries to convince himself to mend his ways. Misfortunes, he tells us, helped him have a glimpse of the light of virtue; he would prefer to die rather than relapse into wrongdoing. He falls asleep in tears as he admonishes himself. The next day he wakes up and finds himself transformed. He has a new heart. Notwithstanding controversies regarding the authenticity of Guzmán’s repentance, the structure, language, and tone of his account clearly resonate with the rhetorical and narrative models associated with conversion in the Christian tradition. These models authenticate Guzmán’s tale as a recognizable and credible conversion narrative; they verify his story. Ryan Szpiech’s Conversion and Narrative: Reading and Religious Authority in Medieval Polemic not only makes a crucial contribution to our understanding of the complexity and subtlety that fictional conversion narratives like Guzmán’s involve, but also provides valuable insights into the sources, development, and significance of conversion as a central religious construct as well as a narrative and rhetorical device in interreligious polemics.

Conversion and Narrative consists of six chapters devoted to close readings of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim conversion narratives drawn from polemical sources. In his introduction, “Conversion and History,” Szpiech defines the theoretical principles underlying his study of narratives of conversion and places his study within the context of current scholarship in the field. By concentrating on documents narrating experiences of conversion, Szpiech productively challenges widely used methodologies in [End Page 433] the study of conversion. Rather than understanding conversion narratives as a mere product of a conversion experience ontologically as well as temporarily prior to them, Szpiech redirects our attention toward the narrative and rhetorical elements that make conversion stories recognizable as such, while investigating the role that these stories play in Christian, Jewish, and Islamic polemical literature.

The first chapter, “From Peripety to Prose: Tracing the Pauline and Augustinian Paradigms,” adumbrates the sources and development of Christian views on conversion as “a textual drama of transformation” (30). Szpiech neatly illustrates the convergence of different paradigms of conversion in Christian sources by analyzing the conversion narrative of Juan Andrés, a faqīh from Xàtiva who converted to Christianity in 1487. Juan Andrés conceives of his conversion as both “a beginning that breaks with” his old religion (36) and a return to the truth from which he had previously deviated. This convert’s contrasting conceptions reflect the disparate images of conversion found in Christian scriptures, particularly in the Acts of the Apostles and the Pauline Epistles, which had only been harmonized in Augustine of Hippo’s encompassing vision of history, time, and revelation. Szpiech’s discussion of Augustine’s influence and contributions is especially illuminating in its broad, comparative scope. Augustinian views of Judaism as a witness to the triumph of Christianity prophesied in the Old Testament, for instance, are shown to play a major part in Christian self-definition as well as in questions of selfhood and otherness with which Jewish converts like Solomon Halevi/Pablo de Santa María engage.

Chapter 2, “Alterity and Auctoritas,” traces the changes brought about by a greater emphasis on reason as the foundation of argumentative authority in eleventh- and twelfth-century Christian polemical writings and the new understanding of textual authority and authenticity that these changes engendered. The expansion of the notions of authority and reason during this period, Szpiech argues, not only meant a “dismantling” of the influential Augustinian view of the theological stature of Judaism, but also implied the reformulation of theological arguments, a burgeoning rhetoric of anti-Judaism, and the increasingly important role of testimonies of Jewish converts in authenticating Christian polemical texts. Szpiech’s close readings of Petrus Alfonsi’s and Herman of Cologne’s conversion stories convincingly situate them among responses to the crisis of auctoritas over the course of the twelfth...

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