Dreaming converts in the seventeenth Century : the case of Philip Dandulo and Thomas Warmstry’s The Baptized Turk

Abstract

This article focuses on a dream embedded within a description of the conversion and baptism of a Turk in London in 1657. The Baptized Turk (1658), written by the Anglican and royalist Thomas Warmstry, tells the story of Rigep Dandulo, a twenty-four year old Muslim man from Smyrna who was baptised by Dr. Peter Gunning at Exeter House chapel. In The Baptized Turk, Warmstry describes and analyzes an elaborate dream experienced by Dandulo and also provides his readers with an extensive guide to dream interpretation. Dream accounts appear frequently in mid-seventeenth-century radical Protestant conversion narratives, but Warmstry makes a case for the role of dreaming in substantiating the converting power of Anglicanism. This frames the narrative as an Anglican (and royalist) riposte to the gathered churches’ dreaming converts, and demonstrates the extent to which Anglicans utilised and transformed the discursive strategies of their religious and political rivals when promoting their own agenda.