Religious Conversion in Early Modern English Drama. Lieke Stelling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. xii + 218 pp. $99.99

Stelling offers the first complete survey of conversion in early modern English drama, and while her approach to intra-Christian conversion in early Protestant England meets with limited success, her comparative study of staged interfaith conversions will prove valuable to a busy area of study. In general, spiritual conversion is a blanket term offering less precision than, say, the terms justification and sanctification; Stelling writes that it “amounts to an intensification of faith, the rejection of a sinful lifestyle, or the pursuit of godliness” (155). [...]this part of the book serves mainly to establish a trajectory leading away from spiritual conversion (of which Stelling finds few pure examples after the 1580s) to the interfaith conversion plays studied in the book's second part.