Making Pagans
Book • 2024
John Kuhn's Making Pagans argues that seventeenth-century English drama created and circulated a theatrical vocabulary of 'pagan' rituals—altars, conjurations, triumphs, and mass suicides—that shaped popular understandings of non-Abrahamic religions.
Tracing these recurring set pieces across a wide repertory, Kuhn shows how stagecraft, repertory practices, and illustrated prose texts produced homologies that linked ancient Rome and Greece with African and indigenous New World societies.
The book situates theatrical practice alongside ethnography, antiquarianism, and apologetics to reveal how cultural reuse and visual representation forged an umbrella category of paganism.
Kuhn connects these representations to colonial law, conversion efforts, and the ideological work that facilitated slavery and imperial expansion.
Drawing on archival research and theater history, the study reconceptualizes popular drama as central to early modern comparative religion and colonial self-definition.
Tracing these recurring set pieces across a wide repertory, Kuhn shows how stagecraft, repertory practices, and illustrated prose texts produced homologies that linked ancient Rome and Greece with African and indigenous New World societies.
The book situates theatrical practice alongside ethnography, antiquarianism, and apologetics to reveal how cultural reuse and visual representation forged an umbrella category of paganism.
Kuhn connects these representations to colonial law, conversion efforts, and the ideological work that facilitated slavery and imperial expansion.
Drawing on archival research and theater history, the study reconceptualizes popular drama as central to early modern comparative religion and colonial self-definition.
Mentioned by
Mentioned in 0 episodes
Mentioned by ![undefined]()
Jane Hwang Degenhardt
John Kuhn, "Making Pagans: Theatrical Practice and Comparative Religion in Early Modern England" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)
