The Ambidextrous Chameleon: Disguise, Conversion, and Fear

Scholars have begun to resist theorizing cultural interactions in binary terms, whether religious or ethnic dichotomies.  Reactions to religious conversion in English sermons of the seventeenth century elided stark differences between the convert and the congregation, especially when a whiff of toleration was detected.  The proximity of Catholicism or Islam at moments – for a merchant or his factor trafficking in distant lands, the common sailor on his vessel, or the crew when pirates took his ship – made accommodation to different customs practical and commercially sound.  Some of the earliest sixteenth-century uses of the term “chameleon” forged a link between changeability of faith and toleration.  Writers warned of the dilution of orthodoxy, even religion itself, through conversion, simple curiosity, or ignorance.

The real creature – and its metaphorical flexibility to represent real people – helped commentators to unite strands of intellectual and religious reasoning.  The ‘chameleon,’ and its relatives ‘amphibians’ and ‘ambo-dexters,’ allowed writers to draw upon natural history, urgent religious debates, and the history of the early church to comment upon human interaction and faith.  Only three seventeenth-century sermons on repentant apostates were published, previously interpreted as an exercise in ‘othering.’  Yet one preacher assumed that “diverse present, have runne the same course with the delinquent (though it cannot be proved as yet).”  His preaching partner suspected that “many hundreds, are Musselmans in Turkie, and Christians at home, doffing their religion, as they doe their clothes, and keeping a conscience for every Harbor where they shall put in.”  This paper will revisit those sermons, as well as natural history texts and other sermons on apostasy, to study how contemporary authors conceived of authenticity and dissimulation and courage and fear in the face of conversion.