A Voice among the Narratives of Women's Conversion : A Queen Changes Religion
Une voix dans les récits de conversion féminine : le changement religieux d'une reine
Résumé
Historiography considers the accounts of conversion as literary and autobiographical accounts of individual or collective religious change, or as controversial works in use during the theological confrontations between Protestants and Catholics in the 16th-17th centuries. It might therefore seem surprising to want to analyse this corpus of printed matter in reflecting on Christine of Sweden from the perspective of the Republic of Letters. Yet this woman is present in the attestation of religious conversion completed by written publication, which is reproductible trace (somtimes even contrefait) of the conversion discourses delivred in front of one's new co-religionists and new ecclesiastical authorities. Moreover, the woman is here a sovereign, abdicating to be able live with her new religious choice as an individual and not for the exercise of power. In order to measure whether the conversion narrative of the "Nothern Minerva" was an exemplar, in this context of religious confrontations through writing, it is necessary to define the specificities of female conversion narratives in the time of the Republic of Letters, in order to better bring out the peculiarities of that of Christine of Sweden, a mixture of feminity and masculinity.