Dreaming Converts in the Seventeenth Century: The Case of Philip Dandulo and Thomas Warmstry's The Baptized Turk

This article focuses on a dream embedded within a description of the conversion and baptism of a Muslim man in London in 1657. The Baptized Turk (1658), written by the royalist Thomas Warmstry, tells the story of Rigep Dandulo, a twenty-four-year-old from Smyrna who was baptised by Dr. Peter Gunning at Exeter House chapel. In The Baptized Turk, Warmstry describes and analyzes an elaborate dream experienced by Dandulo and also provides his readers with an extensive guide to dream interpretation. Dream accounts appear frequently in mid-seventeenth-century radical Protestant conversion narratives, but Warmstry makes a case for the role of dreaming in substantiating the converting power of moderate Protestantism. This frames the narrative as a riposte to the gathered churches' dreaming converts, and demonstrates the extent to which royalists utilized and transformed the discursive strategies of their religious and political rivals when promoting their own agenda.