As my discussions of The Comedy of Errors and Othello illustrate, in the decades surrounding the start of the seventeenth century the popular stage participated in testing the limits of Pauline universalism. Shakespeare's plays explore the implications of an understanding of conversion that both eludes outward marking and overcomes all previous physical and cultural distinctions. Responding to an unstable contemporary religious climate in which commercial and imperial developments also threatened conversions from Christianity, Shakespeare falls back on bodily distinctions to anchor religious differences and to register conversion's embodied effects. This chapter turns to a slightly later time period – the 1620s – after England had established a relatively stable trading presence in the Mediterranean and the threat of conversion to Islam had become a popular theme on the stage. I consider how several early modern plays by Thomas Dekker, Philip Massinger, and Henry Shirley sought to grapple with this contemporary threat by revisiting ancient histories of Christian persecution at the hands of pagans. In evoking correspondences between ancient pagan and contemporary Turkish persecution, these plays demonstrate how Catholic forms of martyrdom and miraculously preserved virginity offered useful models for confronting the contemporary threat. In turn, the particular models of resistance authorized by these plays tell us something about how conversion to Islam was conceived in the popular imagination as an embodied and sexual transformation.