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Taking as its starting point the well-known English effort to 'convert' Venice to Protestantism in the wake of the Venetian Interdict controversy (1606–7), this article explores the ways in which early modern conceptions of conversion varied according to context. Drawing on evidence relating to Venice, England, Ireland and the Jesuit missions to China, it traces how divergent understandings of religious change shaped – and were shaped by – confessional controversy. The idea of 'conversion' posed particular conceptual difficulties as a description of inter-confessional transfer, and this article probes the implications of these difficulties for religious and political debate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1698, less than a decade after the Toleration Act, a blasphemy law was passed in England. No convictions were ever brought under the Act, and it has been largely neglected by historians. Yet, for all its apparent insignificance, the Blasphemy Act is an instructive episode in post-1688 politics, which sheds light on the political realignments of the post-revolutionary decade. The language of the blasphemy debates was theologically sophisticated, rooted in Calvin's understanding of blasphemy as distinctively malicious, and it is clear that the contours of the extra-parliamentary Trinitarian controversy were a source of division in Westminster too. The Blasphemy Act was one means by which the Williamite bishops, under pressure from both the dissenter-dominated moral reform movement and High Church advocates of Convocation, tried to reassert the court's moral leadership. But the significance of the dispute was not limited to ecclesiastical politics; the story of the Blasphemy Act was also closely entwined with that of the more famous 'standing army' controversy. William's Court Whig ministers—often portrayed as areligious pragmatists—exploited the theological fault-lines among Country MPs to legitimise fiscal-military reform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]