Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance by Andrew Hadfield

Abstract

 Reviews narrator, the tragic story from Ovid that sends him to sleep, and the mysterious man in black. Here, B. S. W. Barootes sheds light on the therapeutic benefits of idle activities, including reading; and Rebecca Davies explores the recuperative work of sleep. Ardis Butterfield’s valuable retrospective of the book’s contents completes the framework begun by Fumo’s excellent Introduction. Butterfield reconfigures some of the key features of the Book of the Duchess—including its literary allusions, referencing of lyric, and shape-shiing—as an archive that memorializes Blanche by allowing access to her memory not as an inert image of an irretrievable past but as a living affect assimilated to the continuing present. U  K P B Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance. By A H. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . xvi+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. ‘[T]he opposite of truth hath many-many shapes.’ Montaigne’s observation in his essay ‘Of Lyers’ could serve as an apt motto for Andrew Hadfield’s wide-ranging study of lying in early modern England (where it is quoted on page ). Attending to various religious, rhetorical, and political contexts, Hadfield’s ‘cultural [. . .] history of lying’ (p. ) persuasively demonstrates that early modern conceptions of mendacity were marked by their plurality. A recognition of the noxious effects of lying existed alongside a politics that exploited dissemblance and a literary culture that understood the power of persuasive fictions. A perceived tension between God’s authority and the power wielded by temporal rulers also played an important role in shaping the manner in which lies were used. Hadfield’s volume comprises two parts. e first of these discusses the relationship between lying and oaths: its two chapters, focusing on the Oath of Supremacy () and the Oath of Allegiance (), bookend the historical period covered by the study. Chapter  discusses the trials of omas More and Anne Boleyn, which are informed by ‘a context of oath-breaking, perjury, and lying precipitated by the Reformation’ (p. ). Hadfield’s treatment of More is especially illuminating , showing how appeals to divinity could justify dissimulation: More’s promise before God surpassed Henry’s oath in its binding force. Hadfield’s discussion of Wyatt’s poetry is likewise effective in demonstrating how a new scrutiny on spoken words inflected literary representations. In Chapter  Hadfield’s investigation of the accounts of the persecution of Roman Catholics later in the period uncovers further connections between lies, political power, and discursive practices. Whereas James’s oath demanded that it be sworn ‘according to the plain and common sense and understanding’ of its own words (quoted on page. ), Catholic adherents formulated an array of verbal dissemblance techniques that would preserve the speaker as a ‘truth-teller before God, while deliberately misleading the authorities’ (p. ). Again, Hadfield usefully places the treatises and trials of Catholics that he examines within broader literary and political contexts. e second part contains expansive and detailed case studies, showing how MLR, .,   notions of lying depended on different circumstances. Chapter  examines lying in religious contexts: it demonstrates the variety of positions adopted vis-à-vis dissemblance in the religious turmoil of the period, when a polemically stark distinction between truth and lies existed alongside strategic ‘duplicity’ in terms of religious allegiance (p. ). Hadfield turns to rhetoric, commonplacing, and poetics in Chapter , where he examines the dangers and uses of mendacity in Renaissance rhetoric, and the strategic advantage of literary fictions for Sidney. Perhaps the most compelling part of this chapter occurs when it thinks about the hermeneutic aspects of deception, particularly in addressing the relationship between lying and humanist reading practices adumbrated by Erasmus. Chapters  and  are arguably the strongest elements of the volume’s second part. e first of these, examining courtesy, lying, and politics, draws on Spenser, courtesy books, Machiavelli, and Cicero to assess the uneasily close relationship between courtly politics and dissembling; it also features a superbly nuanced reading of political lying in Marlowe’s plays. Chapter  attends to testimony, and as such allows for a wonderfully detailed account of fictive embellishments and literary archetypes...