Reformation Fictions rehabilitates some twenty polemical dialogues
published in Elizabethan England, for the first time giving them a
literary, historicist and, to a lesser extent, theological reading.
By juxtaposing these Elizabethan publications with key Lutheran and
Calvinist dialogues, theological tracts, catechisms, sermons, and
dramatic interludes, Antoinina Bevan Zlatar explores how individual
dialogists exploit the fictionality of their chosen genre.
Writers like John Veron, Anthony Gilby, George Gifford, John
Nicholls, Job Throckmorton, and Arthur Dent, to name the most
prolific, not only understood the dialogue's didactic advantages
over other genres, they also valued it as a strategic defence
against the censor. They were convinced, as Erasmus had been before
them, that a cast of lively characters presented antithetically,
often with a liberal dose of Lucianic humour, worked wonders with
carnal readers. Here was an exemplary way to make doctrine
entertaining and memorable, here was the honey to make the medicine
go down. They knew too that these dialogues, particularly their use
of manifestly imaginary interlocutors and a plot of conversion,
licensed the delivery of singularly radical messages.
What comes to light is a body of literature, often scurrilous,
always serious, that gives us access to early modern concepts of
fiction, rhetoric, and satire. It showcases the imagery of
Protestant polemic against Catholicism, and puritan invective
against the established Elizabethan Church, all the while
triggering the frisson that comes from the illusion of
eavesdropping on early modern conversations.
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