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

August 28, 2026

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5 min read

In 1588, a preacher named Anthony Terrell climbed into the pulpit at St. Paul’s Cross in London to denounce the Church of England, only to return weeks later to recant. Over the course of his life, he would change religious allegiance as many as ten times. Critics sneered that he had “as many religions as a cat has lives.” But was he a fraud, or a man of unusually restless conscience? That question drives Holly Crawford Pickett’s The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), the first sustained study of repeated religious conversion in the period. Pickett, an associate professor of English at Washington and Lee University, argues that serial converts have been dismissed too quickly—and that their stories force us to rethink what conversion even meant in a world where changing churches could mean changing your life.

What “Conversion” Meant—and What It Didn’t

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What you'll learn

1 (01:31) **Introduction: The Problem of Serial Conversion** - Host Michael Shaw introduces the central question: how to tell if a religious conversion is real or fabricated, using the example of Anthony Terrell who changed allegiance up to ten times.
2 (02:49) **Holly Pickett's Academic Background and Initial Fascination** - Pickett explains how she was drawn to the study of serial conversion through her graduate training in early modern religious culture.
3 (05:50) **Revising Established Ideas About Conversion** - Pickett outlines the conventional "evangelical conversion narrative" model exemplified by John Bunyan's *Grace Abounding* (1666).
4 (08:11) **The Motives Tradition and William Alabaster** - Pickett describes how William Alabaster's conversion was triggered by reading a Catholic polemical tract defending marginal glosses in a Bible translation.
5 (11:47) **Anthony Terrell: Serial Convert or Spiritual Distress?** - Pickett resists dismissing Terrell as a mere hypocrite or opportunist, arguing instead that he experienced the symptoms of a "post-Reformation divided conscience."
6 (19:52) **The Unforgivable Sin and Theological Limits** - The discussion turns to Hebrews 6 and the question of whether there is a point where repentance becomes impossible for serial converts.
7 (22:53) **Political Utility and Credibility** - Pickett explains that serial converts could "burn their goodwill" and lose political credibility, using De Dominis as an example.

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Show Notes

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 troublingly evident. Yet as Holly Pickett argues in The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024), these performative elements are actually indispensable to any conversion, whether an individual’s first or fifteenth.

Serial converts served as uncomfortable reminders to their contemporaries that religious identity is always unverifiable. The first study to explore serial conversion as a discrete phenomenon in this era, The Drama of Serial Conversion in Early Modern England challenges confessional divisions within much early modern historiography by analyzing the surprising convergence of Protestant and Catholic in the figure of the serial convert. It also reveals a neglected strain of religious discourse in early modern England that valued mutability and flexibility even in the midst of hardening and increasingly narrow understandings of conversion.

Michael Shaw is a PhD student in Historical Theology at Union College, Belfast, and a Visiting Tutor at the Irish Baptist College. His research focuses on the thought of the Independent Puritan theologian Jeremiah Burroughs (1599–1646). His primary research interests lie in historical theology, particularly early modern Baptist and Congregationalist theology and ecclesiology. He also serves as the Associate Pastor at Strandtown Baptist Church, Belfast.

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