Description
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 to define 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; works of 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.
About the Author
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 of Religion (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.
Reviews
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. * Joseph Ashmore, Modern Language Review *
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. * Harriet Archer, The English Association *
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. * Andrew Sisson, Modern Philology *
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. * Niall Allsopp, Literature & History *
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'. * Mary Ann Lund, Renaissance Studies *
The book's greatest strength is its remarkable detail. Hadfield's expansive approach is the wealth of many years as one of the most productive scholars in the early modern period. Frequently he cites a single page or a short section in a book that is for the most part on another topic - such references demonstrate a remarkable synthesis of his extensive reading in early modern culture and criticism . . . a flowing and erudite tour through the period's influential culture of lying * Renaissance Quarterly *
A book that wonderfully fulfils new historicism's early promise to read history as literature and not only vice versa... As Hadfield compellingly argues, we badly need a strategy for questioning the historical events that are known to us "through documents full of lies," and the only way to do this is to understand the period's pervasive culture of lying since this alone will properly determine "what we uncover in the written records left behind" (p. 4). Setting its discussions within the context of the 1534 Treason Act (which made seditious words as liable to punishment as seditious acts) and the Reformation (which encouraged specific modes of equivocation), the book proceeds to a series of case studies as it takes in works by William Baldwin, Ben Jonson, Foxe, Robert Southwell, Spenser, Donne, Michel de Montaigne, George Puttenham, Sidney, Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, Shakespeare, and others. * SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *
Andrew Hadfield is at his analytical best on treason trials. ... These grippingly expounded narratives, case studies in lying and its justifications, stand at either end of a period in which, the book proposes, conceptions of lying were culturally transformed by a variety of means. ... profoundly sympathetic, enjoyable and extremely wide-ranging. * Lorna Hutson, Times Literary Supplement *
It is impossible in the space of this review to give justice to the abundance of insights emerging from the author's masterful textual analysis... this book should be required reading for any historian or literary scholar interested in the epistemological and cultural significance of the relationship between truth and lying in any time period. * Stefania Tutino, Review of English Studies *
Book Information
ISBN 9780192844804
Author Andrew Hadfield
Format Paperback
Page Count 386
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 592g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 20mm
About the Author
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 of Religion (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.
Reviews
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. * Joseph Ashmore, Modern Language Review *
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. * Harriet Archer, The English Association *
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. * Andrew Sisson, Modern Philology *
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. * Niall Allsopp, Literature & History *
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'. * Mary Ann Lund, Renaissance Studies *
The book's greatest strength is its remarkable detail. Hadfield's expansive approach is the wealth of many years as one of the most productive scholars in the early modern period. Frequently he cites a single page or a short section in a book that is for the most part on another topic - such references demonstrate a remarkable synthesis of his extensive reading in early modern culture and criticism . . . a flowing and erudite tour through the period's influential culture of lying * Renaissance Quarterly *
A book that wonderfully fulfils new historicism's early promise to read history as literature and not only vice versa... As Hadfield compellingly argues, we badly need a strategy for questioning the historical events that are known to us "through documents full of lies," and the only way to do this is to understand the period's pervasive culture of lying since this alone will properly determine "what we uncover in the written records left behind" (p. 4). Setting its discussions within the context of the 1534 Treason Act (which made seditious words as liable to punishment as seditious acts) and the Reformation (which encouraged specific modes of equivocation), the book proceeds to a series of case studies as it takes in works by William Baldwin, Ben Jonson, Foxe, Robert Southwell, Spenser, Donne, Michel de Montaigne, George Puttenham, Sidney, Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, Shakespeare, and others. * SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 *
Andrew Hadfield is at his analytical best on treason trials. ... These grippingly expounded narratives, case studies in lying and its justifications, stand at either end of a period in which, the book proposes, conceptions of lying were culturally transformed by a variety of means. ... profoundly sympathetic, enjoyable and extremely wide-ranging. * Lorna Hutson, Times Literary Supplement *
It is impossible in the space of this review to give justice to the abundance of insights emerging from the author's masterful textual analysis... this book should be required reading for any historian or literary scholar interested in the epistemological and cultural significance of the relationship between truth and lying in any time period. * Stefania Tutino, Review of English Studies *
Book Information
ISBN 9780192844804
Author Andrew Hadfield
Format Paperback
Page Count 386
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 592g
Dimensions(mm) 235mm * 156mm * 20mm
