This chapter discusses five anti-Catholic dialogues, all of which engage explicitly with highly topical issues. A dialogue agaynst the tyrannye of the papistes (1562), attributed to Walter Haddon, exploits the massacre of Protestants in France to advocate English support for the Huguenots. In An historical dialogve tovching antichrist and poperie (1589) Thomas Rogers sees divine intervention in the defeat of the Armada and proof of the ‘truth‘ of Protestantism. The chapter argues that John Nicholls's Pilgrimage (1581) and George Gifford's A Dialogue betweene a papist and a protestant (1582)...

This chapter discusses five anti-Catholic dialogues, all of which engage explicitly with highly topical issues. A dialogue agaynst the tyrannye of the papistes (1562), attributed to Walter Haddon, exploits the massacre of Protestants in France to advocate English support for the Huguenots. In An historical dialogve tovching antichrist and poperie (1589) Thomas Rogers sees divine intervention in the defeat of the Armada and proof of the ‘truth‘ of Protestantism. The chapter argues that John Nicholls's Pilgrimage (1581) and George Gifford's A Dialogue betweene a papist and a protestant (1582) form part of a government‐sponsored media campaign to convict the Jesuit Edmund Campion of treason. Finally, in A conference betwixt a mother…and her son (1600), Francis Savage tackles female Catholic recusancy, the long‐standing bugbear of the government and the bishops. A dextrous deployment of characterization and a plot of failed or successful conversion licenses hard-hitting messages.