The Cartography of Conversion: Protestant Converts and the Arts of Navigation

• In Event: Materiality in Motion: Material Cultures of Movement

Abstract

This paper focuses upon the journey trope in Protestant conversion narratives. Rather than looking at the allegorical spiritual movement typified by John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), however, I explore texts including Richard Norwood’s Confessions (1639), where the journey trope is grounded in recollected movement through time and space. In seeking a form of direct transmission or transferral between the body’s empirical, observational ‘truth’ and a metaphorical spiritual cartography, Protestant writers frequently rely upon the language of mapping and navigation, resulting in a plottable geographical specificity which means that the convert’s journey (both actual and spiritual) can be verified and replicated. This is reminiscent of the traditional Catholic pilgrimage narrative, but in describing a spiritual change principally via the language of cartographic measurement and containment rather than highlighting a journey to a specific sacred space, these Protestant writers transform the physical labour of faith into an act of narrative map making.

Author

• Abigail Shinn, University of St Andrews