Though Tudor and Stuart drama is studied more intensively than most bodies of literature, its generic cousin, the dialogue, remains under-appreciated. Thanks to Timothy Scott McGinnis's study of the Puritan dialogue-writer George Gifford and Joseph L. Black's recent edition of the Martin Marprelate tracts, this is gradually changing, and the current study is sure to foster its further recognition. Given how rooted dialogues are in contemporary debates, especially those inspired by the English Reformation, it is no surprise that Bevan Zlatar's precursors – John N. King in his pioneering English Reformation literature and, more recently, Ian Green throughout his magisterial works on Reformation popular literature – have treated them primarily as historical artefacts. But, as Antoinina Bevan Zlatar writes, ‘These bold little books were everywhere, and it was their fictionality which licensed their boldness.’ Here, she joins Frances E. Dolan, Jesse Lander and other recent scholars who have developed our awareness of Reformation polemic's imaginative achievements. Bevan Zlatar's study concentrates upon Elizabethan England, but this enables her to identify a nascent canon within that reign, and achieve a sharp focus on how the dialogue's literary achievements and possibilities developed in that most exciting of literary periods. Her book begins with a useful brief account of how the dialogue form, as deployed in the Renaissance, drew from and impacted upon the real-life debates advanced by the reformers. The continental context is sketched in via a consideration of John Véron's career, but the rest of the book is devoted to native vernacular literature and thematically arranged, with chapters on anti-Catholicism, the debates surrounding episcopacy, and the fight against a notional atheism. Bevan Zlatar is well in command of the technical vocabulary throughout, but, thankfully, avoids the nerdiness common among those who discuss Renaissance rhetoric. The glossary of lesser-known rhetorical terms at the end of the study, illustrated both by contemporary definitions and by examples from the dialogues themselves, is a particularly useful resource.