Ceri Sullivan looks at all devotional texts in English produced by Catholic and overseas presses during the intense period of government repression of "papists." While the official rhetoric denied the power and centrality of these texts, they were consumed by Catholic, church-papist, and Anglican, providing matter for later, more famous writers such as John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Henry Constable. She shows how they are unabashed in their use of formal oratory to capture the passion and will of a reader. Texts were both part of the mission effort to reconvert Britain, and in providing matter for internal conversion, creating devotion where a dilettante taste for style had once fed.