ABSTRACT
Professional soldier Barnabe Riche publicly announced his withdrawal from military service and devoted himself to his other chief interest: the writing of prose fiction in 1581. Riche set out to lift the veil, first by exposing Orton's original testimonies as the symptom of a barely averted priestly deception and then by denouncing a persistent belief in Roman Catholic doctrine as an instance of mass delusion. Merely to publish them under the proper framework was to identify them as a sort of literary activity: as fiction, they could be read for entertainment rather than testimony. With regard to its design and purpose, Riche's True Report bears signs of certain fundamental tensions between the following: a polemical strategy of appropriating the wide array of literary forms in order to reframe the terms of religious debate; a tacit recognition that those same forms could be used to interrogate the very conventions through which religious polemic was being conducted.
