[1] The work was written in 1553, during the final months of the reign of King Edward VI, but was not published because the accession of Mary Tudor to the throne prevented it.
On publication in its 1570 edition it was subject to an anonymous poetic riposte of 56 lines, "A short Answere to the boke called: Beware the Cat", which rebukes the author for making fun of the narrator Master Gregory Streamer (who is not otherwise known to have really existed).
It received almost no attention from literary scholars, although William P. Holden produced an obscure edition in the original archaic English, issued from Connecticut College in 1963.
Streamer offers to persuade his interlocutors in the affirmative, and proceeds to deliver a monologue which constitutes the rest of the book.
Streamer's account describes his activities while lodging at the London printing house of John Day, a prominent Tudor printer.
The third speaker objects to the reasonableness of Thomas's story, and Master Sherry, the fourth interlocutor, asserts that he believes in the existence of witches, and says that the bishop of Alexandria had found a way to understand birds.
He consults a "book of secrets" which had been attributed to the thirteenth-century philosopher Albertus Magnus, and finds there a recipe to understand birds.
Streamer modifies this recipe and acquires various animal organs and body parts, including those of a hedgehog, fox, rabbit, kite, and cat.
They have gathered to consume decaying remains of dismembered body parts of executed traitors, which have been affixed above the city gate adjacent to Streamer's lodging.
During this time, Protestant reformers brought change to England's religious laws, but some resisted these efforts, at least according to this satire.
Mouseslayer tells how she had witnessed forbidden Catholic rituals; her story incorporates antifeminist lore and ribald humor associated with the medieval genre of fabliaux (John N. King, Voices of the English Reformation (2004), p. 152.)