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The Paradigm It is traditional to talk of the systematic change in Manzoni's outlook, thinking and belief which took place around 1810 as his conversion or reconversion to Christianity. The term 'conversion' is doubly relevant to this paper. Not only will its subject be Manzoni's variant representations of religious conversion (achieved or missed) within his creative works of the period from his own conversion to the first publication of I promessi sposi in 1827. These works are themselves 'conversions' in the more special sense of 're-writings'. We have the Inni sacri, sacred poems, in which the gospel narrative is used as a base and a model for the conjunction of divine history and human history: one tenable definition of the Inni sacri is therefore that they are a re-writing and a contemplation of sacred history as also empirical history. The two tragedies and the novel, conversely, give us the conversion of profane history into sacred history and can be defined as Christian mimeses (representations) of secular histories. If all writing can be seen as rewriting and all discourse as differance, here in Manzoni's works of 1810 to 1827 we have a very specific version of the discursive transaction, a very specific kind of 'conversion'.! This paper will focus on the latter group of works, Manzoni's 're-writing' of secular histories as Christian histories. The poem on the death of Napoleon, II cinque maggio, will also be examined under this rubric. This re-writing involves the avowedly fictive or imaginative element which to Manzoni's evident discomfort characterizes his two tragedies
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