Holly Crawford Pickett, "The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2024)

After mounting London’s outdoor pulpit known as St. Paul’s Cross on

8th December, 1588, Anthony Tyrrell found himself perched before a

skeptical audience. He stood in the shadow of St. Paul’s Cathedral to

declare his recantation of Catholicism and return to England’s official

Protestant Church. The trouble was he had been there before – in January

of the same year, in fact – to do the same thing. On that occasion,

however, he had shocked on-lookers by delivering an anti-Protestant

tirade instead of his promised recantation. How could Tyrrell, a serial

convert, who eventually changed church affiliation as many as ten times,

overcome the doubts of his suspicious audience? Tyrrell and similar

converts who made multiple conversions understandably aroused suspicions

of hypocrisy that made the performative character of public recantation