This Turk's persecution for the faith Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort and the Reformation Debate on Martyrdom

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.