During his imprisonment for the murder of Gabriel Spencer in 1598, Ben Jonson converted to the outlawed Roman Catholic Church, and for the next 12 years made no attempt to conceal his recusant status. Jonson’s biography and the historical documents treating conversion and recusancy offer evidence of the importance Jonson placed on codified religion, and provide a distinctly religious context for much of what has long been assumed to be an exclusively classically-based secular ethics operating in his writing.

1. Renaissance and Reformation

Original publication: Crowley, James P. ""He took his religion by trust": The Matter of Ben Jonson's Conversion." Renaissance and Reformation 34 (1): 2010. 53-70. DOI: 10.33137/rr.v34i1.10848. This material has been re-published in an unmodified form on the Canadian HSS Commons with the permission of Iter Canada / Renaissance and Reformation. Copyright © the author(s). Their work is distributed by Renaissance and Reformation under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. For details, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/.