Lying in Early Modern English Culture

Lying in Early Modern English Culture is a major study of ideas of truth and falsehood in early modern England from the advent of the Reformation to the aftermath of the failed Gunpowder Plot. The period is characterised by panic and chaos when few had any idea how religious, cultural, and social life would develop after the traumatic division of Christendom. While many saw the need for a secular power todefine the truth others declared that their allegiances belonged elsewhere. Accordingly there was a constant battle between competing authorities for the right to declare what was the truth and so label opponents as liars. Issues of truth and lying were, therefore, a constant feature of everyday life and determined ideas of individual identity, politics,speech, sex, marriage, and social behaviour, as well as philosophy and religion. This book is a cultural history of truth and lying from the 1530s to the 1610s, showing how lying needs to be understood in action as well as in theory. Unlike most histories of lying, it concentrates on a series of particular events reading them in terms of academic theories and more popular notions of lying. The book covers a wide range of material such as the trials of Ann Boleyn and Thomas More, the divorce of Frances Howard, and the murder of Anthony James by Annis and George Dell; worksof literature such as Othello, The Faerie Queene, A Mirror for Magistrates, and The Unfortunate Traveller; works of popular culture such as the herring pamphlet of 1597; and major writings by Castiglione, Montaigne, Erasmus, Luther, and Tyndale.

Hadfield's volume is excellent in its breadth of sources (both familiar and more recondite) and in its detailed methods of contextualization. ...this book will endure as a major piece of scholarship and an important authority on lying for any scholars interestedin early modern politics, rhetoric, and religion., Andrew Hadfield's Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance shows how lying went hand in hand with the concept of truth in early modern discourse., Lying in Early Modern English Culture grapples alertly with challenging moral and epistemological questions, makes suggestive connections across a wide array of textual materials, and offers scholars a variety of interpretive frames in which to situate early modern liars and lying., Hadfield is 'sceptical of how much a history of lying as a concept on its own will really tell us'. Rather, we need to reconstruct 'how lies are produced, how they are imagined, analysed, and understood, and in which contexts they are articulated' (pp. 29-30). What results is a fast-paced book, structured through a series of nimble and intriguing case studies., Andrew Hadfield's fine book is deeply invested both in the cultural contexts that lead to lying in the early modern period, and in the tangled ways in which lies play out in the spoken and written word. ... Hadfield's study of lying, like Othello itself, can make for a discomforting and unsettling reading experience; it prompts reflections on the myriad modes in which all of us play fast and loose with truth-telling, in a society where we are quick to claim ownership of the truth and brand our opponents as liars. But above all, Hadfield reanimates the distinctive culture of early modern English lying, showing in action that, as Montaigne put it, 'the opposite of truth hath many-many shapes, and an undefinite field'.

Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex and Visiting Professor at the University of Granada. He is the author of a number of studies of early modern literature and culture including Edmund Spenser: A Life (2012), which was awarded the Elizabeth Dietz Memorial Award; Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005), which was awarded the Roland H. Bainton Prize for Literature; John Donne: In the Shadow ofReligion (2021); and Literature and Class from the Peasants' Revolt to the French Revolution (2021). He is currently editing the Complete Works of Thomas Nashe for OUP with Joseph Black, Jennifer Richards and Cathy Shrank.