Abstract
This article investigates certain aspects of the first mission of the Society of Jesus in England in the context of the current historiographical debate on the issue of religious dissimulation. While traditionally English Catholicism and the Jesuit mission to England have been linked to Nicodemism, or the need to dissimulate one's religious faith in order to escape persecution, this article argues that the clandestine conditions in which the Catholic missionaries were forced to operate constituted an ideal background to experiment with another form of dissimulation, more akin to the kind of ‘offensive’ dissimulation suggested by Machiavelli to his Prince and systematized during the seventeenth century as ‘honest’ dissimulation.
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