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Catholic Spectacle and Rome’s Jews: Early Modern Conversion and Resistance

byEmily Michelson

Emily Michelson examines the compulsory sermons delivered to Rome's Jews and shows how conversionary spectacle became central to early modern Catholic identity. Church authorities staged preaching, processions, and ritual performances to demonstrate power, while Jewish listeners developed ways to endure, interpret, and resist. The book reconstructs both institutional ambition and community response through archives often written by the persecutors. Michelson reveals Rome as a shared but unequal religious landscape where coercion depended on public theater, and where Jewish persistence exposed the limits of the Church's campaign to produce visible conversion.

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Publication date

2022

Format

Print edition

Pages

—

ISBN

9780691211336