“This Turk’s persecution for the faith”

The fictional setting of Thomas More’s Dialogue of Comfort (1534) on the eve of the Turkish invasion in Hungary, gives the work a peculiar semantic polyphony which has often been addressed but never sufficiently explained. By examining both the dialogue’s main theme and its fictional setting within their relevant contexts in Reformation discourse – especially the contemporary debate about true and false martyrdom – this article aims at shedding new light on how the literary makeup of the text actually functions. More’s Dialogue is read essentially as a polemical work, in which he masterfully asserts his own title to martyrdom by pulling all the polemical stops Reformation discourse had to offer

Art · Epistemology · Faith · Linguistics · Literature · Persecution · Political science · Polyphony · Theme (computing) · Turkish · Historical Influence and Diplomacy · Law · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity