ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 explores the Catholic exilic polemics of the Allen-Persons’s party from the mid to late sixteenth century, specifically those of William Cardinal Allen, Robert Persons, and Thomas Stapleton. As case studies, these texts help demonstrate a Catholic discourse of exile distinct from the Protestant one that nevertheless shares commonalities with it. As a pair, Chapters 3 and 4 show how the polemic culture represented by these exiles questions the relationship between exile and nation in, among other things, their focus on foundational narratives. That struggle, I argue, led to a genre I call polemic chronicle, which repurposes and rewrites historical origin narratives to define and confess an English national identity informed by a mind of exile.
