Catholic Prophylactics and Islam's Sexual Threat: Preventing and Undoing Sexual Defilement in The Renegado

Abstract

Despite the continuing reverberations of the Protestant Reformation, Philip Massinger's The Renegado (1624) endorses surprisingly Catholic practices as necessary measures for resisting and reversing Islamic conversion. I seek to explain the play's Catholic content by focusing on how the emerging racialization of Islam may have pressured a renegotiation of Protestant-Catholic disagreements over effective means of Christian resistance and redemption. In considering the question of whether conversion to Islam is reversible for Christian men and women, I identify a tension in the play between spiritual redemption and embodied resistance that divides along the lines of gender. Whereas the Christian protagonist's sexual transgression with a Muslim woman is redeemable through spiritual repentance, the Christian heroine's chastity is vigilantly protected with the aid of a holy relic, revealing her greater vulnerability to racial reinscription. I argue that the play's selective supplementation of Christian faith with Catholic materials and rituals speaks not only to the political benefits of merging Catholic and Protestant interests against the Muslim enemy, but more specifically to the ways in which the embodied and sexualized threat of Islamic conversion necessitated physical or tangible forms of resistance.

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