• I. Introduction


• II. Dialogues profitable, delightsome and bold


• 1: De utilitate colloquiorum


• 2: The authors, their creations, and the nature of fiction


• III. Tudor Precursors


• 1: Henrician priests and insubordinate servants


• 2: The Edwardian Whore of Babylon


• 3: Marian wolves


• IV. 'Englishing' Pierre Viret: the Case of John Véron


• 1: Pierre Viret's Disputations chrestiennes


• 2: 'Englishing' Pierre Viret or The Huntynge of Purgatorye to Death


• 3: Véron's rhetoric of refutation


• V. Fear of Popery


• 1: French butchers and Spanish galleons


• 2: The Campion affair: John Nicholls and George Gifford


• 3: Francis Savage and recusant wives


• VI. Puritans against the Bishops


• 1: Archbishop Parker's comely, one-eyed chaplain


• 2: Bitter laughter: John Udall, Job Throckmorton and Martin Marprelate


• VII. Fear of Atheism


• 1: George Gifford's country parishioner


• 2: I. B.'s country parson


• VIII. Applying oneself to the capacity of the unlearned


• A Glossary of Rhetorical Terms


• Bibliography


• Index

Antoinina Bevan Zlatar read English at Lincoln College, Oxford, before completing a doctorate in English literature and Reformation history at the University of Geneva.

Reformation Fictions rehabilitates a body of little-known Elizabethan texts. It takes some twenty polemical Protestant dialogues written predominantly by puritan clerics, and for the first time gives them a literary, historicist and, to a lesser extent, theological reading.