Pious Fraud Research Articles

The Enduring Vertigo of the Elect Lady

Of the legacy of Joseph Smith, historian Bernard DeVoto wrote in 1936, “The vision perishes; it is the vertigo that endures.” Reading the novel The Prophet's Wife by Libbie Grant is to feel that same perishing vision and enduring vertigo experienced by DeVoto and countless Latter-day Saints negotiating their relationship to the inherited past of their own faith today.The grounds of the early Saints and polygamy are well-trod within Mormon literature. Where Grant—Washington Post bestselling author of One for the Blackbird, written under her pen name Olivia Hawker—breaks new ground is in the decision to foreground one of the most controversial figures in Mormon history: Emma Hale Smith.Grant's Emma is strong, disillusioned, and profoundly independent—not merely “a wife” but “the wife of Joseph Smith Junior” (2), as she declares to the governor of Illinois in the opening chapter. She watches, often powerlessly, as her young husband Joseph, equal terms charismatic and narcissistic, weaves a pious fraud that ultimately ensnares and destroys him.Folk magic and polygamy figure prominently in the narrative. Inspired by scholarly work like D. Michael Quinn's Early Mormonism and the Magic Worldview and John L. Brooke's The Refiner's Fire, Grant's foregrounding of early Mormonism's connections to western esotericism is a significant addition to her narrative. Revelatory, too, is Grant's frank treatment of the sexual ramifications (and abuses) that some argue characterized early Latter-day Saint marriages. Grant is not as gentle or nuanced with this material as some past Mormon authors were. The quiet devastation of Virginia Sorensen's A Little Lower than the Angels and the earnestly awkward kingdom building of Maurine Whipple's The Giant Joshua are entirely absent from The Prophet's Wife; what remains is a cutting critique of Mormon patriarchy. The Prophet's Wife goes for the jugular in ways that are bound to be uncomfortable for practicing Latter-day Saints.The narrative is punchy and pithy, and the voice is largely true to the time. It bogs down occasionally, however, in dialogue-heavy sections, where the dialogue doesn't ring true and pulls readers out of the skin of the characters. Grant's depiction of Emma herself is likely to be the most controversial—Emma doesn't believe her husband is a real prophet and even has romantic dalliances with Joseph's brother Don Carlos (which Grant, in an author's note, acknowledges is not historical). While Grant's depiction of Emma never feels entirely wrong, the book itself transcends historicity for a more important debate. Where The Prophet's Wife succeeds most is in its demonstration that the life of Emma Smith has extraordinary relevance to the challenges roiling the Brighamites nearly two centuries later. Today's Mormons find themselves just as haunted by the ghosts of their faith's founding sins as they were in Emma's time. If The Prophet's Wife is characterized as anti-Mormon literature by practicing Saints, it will be because the novel demonstrates precisely how institutional Mormonism's mythical self-regard furthers its contemporary oppression of women. Though Mormon readers may find themselves wishing for the more sympathetic treatments provided by Sorensen and Whipple, the reality remains that gentler treatments from our past have all but failed to yield institutional introspection, much less repentance. Perhaps nuance is not what we deserve?The Prophet's Wife is precisely the kind of narrative that unfurls in the maelstrom when “the vision perishes”—a critique of contemporary Mormonism's failures told through historical fiction. A product of enduring vertigo though it is, Grant's work proves a champion of women's resiliency and autonomy in the face of oppression—and that, perhaps, is the only solid ground upon which we can safely build.

“Briskness in the Market of Shaikh-Dom”: The Commercialization of Piety in Early Eighteenth-Century Delhi

Among the primary targets of the so-called reformers of Indian Islam of the eighteenth century were the so-called false mystics of their era. In their oft-expressed complaints against shopkeeper-mystics and pious frauds, this article discerns a sharpening crisis of values between the pursuit of the eternal divine and the allurements of evanescent earthly pleasures. Such a crisis of values, contends this article, should not simply be understood as part of some process of the decline and renewal of Islam in the Mughal empire. Rather, it was caused by a very real anxiety about the erosion of long-standing pious ideals by the forces of commerce that swept across the subcontinent in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. By comparing a range of biographical compendia, hagiographies, epistles, chronicles, poetry, and belles lettres produced by Mughal intellectuals, this article illustrates the ways in which the seductions of both elite influence and mass veneration combined to thwart the Sufi’s path at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Roger Bacon and the Pseudo-Ovidian De vetula

The De vetula, a pseudo-Ovidian epic in three books, is generally considered anonymous, but it has sometimes been attributed to Richard of Fournival. This article refutes the association of Richard with the poem and instead suggests that Roger Bacon, the first author to mention the De vetula, wrote the poem in the first half of the 1260s as a pious fraud in keeping with his argument in his Opus maius that ancient pagan scholars had predicted the tenets of Christianity.

ДОСЛІДЖЕННЯ АГРЕСИВНОСТІ ЗІ СТАВЛЕННЯМ ДО СВОГО І ЧУЖОГО ОБМАНУ В ПІДЛІТКОВОМУ ВІЦІ

The article deals with the problem of aggression in adolescence in the correlation with various types of deception. The use of techniques of I. P. Shkuratova ("Types of deception", "Attitude to other people`s deception", "Attitude to your deception"), Buss-Durkey Inventory intended for diagnosing aggressive and hostile reactions that allowed to identify significant positive correlation between all indicators of aggression and types of deception. It is determined that in both groups there is almost the same attitude towards other people`s deception. Thus, representatives of high and low levels of aggressiveness demonstrate an uncensorious attitude to etiquettical deception, pious fraud, fraud-fantasy, which are recognized as socially acceptable. It is established that people with a high level of aggression choose a competitive style of behavior, which is manifested in the control of the opponent's actions, pressure by all available means, the use of deception, cunning, insults, etc. Pepople with a low level of aggression tend to use avoidable and adaptive types of behavior, which are characterized by constant compliance with the requirements of the enemy, the desire to please everyone, avoiding offense, indecision in critical situations.

Performance Anxiety in Our Mutual Friend

Abstract The theatricality of Our Mutual Friend seems most apparent in its many schemers' extravagant role-playing and pious frauds. But in Betty Higden's death scene, Dickens stages a new form of narrative intimacy based not on interiority but on the dramatic acoustics of very close exteriority. This article also considers Dickens's own strategies as a writer and public reader to achieve intimacy through performance across a range of theatrical scales. This is the slightly modified script of a paper delivered at the 2014 Dickens Universe at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This piece offers an account of Dickens's relationship with his audiences through performance—on the page and in person—and since the lecture itself attempts to enact some of Dickens's performance techniques, various markers of its oral delivery have been preserved here.

Performance Anxiety in Our Mutual Friend

Abstract The theatricality of Our Mutual Friend seems most apparent in its many schemers' extravagant role-playing and pious frauds. But in Betty Higden's death scene, Dickens stages a new form of narrative intimacy based not on interiority but on the dramatic acoustics of very close exteriority. This article also considers Dickens's own strategies as a writer and public reader to achieve intimacy through performance across a range of theatrical scales. This is the slightly modified script of a paper delivered at the 2014 Dickens Universe at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This piece offers an account of Dickens's relationship with his audiences through performance—on the page and in person—and since the lecture itself attempts to enact some of Dickens's performance techniques, various markers of its oral delivery have been preserved here.

Pious Fraud and Secret Chamber: <I>Our Mutual Friend</I> and the Intertextual Marriage Plot

Pious Fraud and Secret Chamber: <I>Our Mutual Friend</I> and the Intertextual Marriage Plot

“I remain, an airy phantasm”: Lucy Hutchinson’s Civil War Ghost Writing

The Restoration has often been described as a period haunted by the civil wars. The Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson , Lucy Hutchinson’s 1660s account of the wars and their aftermath, tells a very different kind of ghost story, one that challenges us to rethink both this narrative of national trauma, as well as the binary gender analysis that has limited our understanding of her wartime writing. Throughout her work, Hutchinson represents the instability of identity, from her detailing of impersonations in the life story of her husband, to her description of double images in her elegies, to her depiction of “pious fraud” in her Genesis poem, Order and Disorder . Drawing on recent work by historians on the experience of the civil wars, this essay investigates a range of Hutchinson’s genres, showing that her engagement with so-called “identity problems” reached far beyond the marital dyad, or even the hierarchy of God, husband, and wife. Responding to the civil wars, Hutchinson performs a series of improvisations in which she embraces the unstable and phantasmatic nature of earthly existence as part of divine will, and makes a series of subtle distinctions between the deceits of her opponents and the “pious frauds” of the Godly.

“Pious Fraud”: Genesis Matriarchs and the Typological Imagination in Lucy Hutchinson’sOrder and Disorder

“Pious Fraud”: Genesis Matriarchs and the Typological Imagination in Lucy Hutchinson’s<i>Order and Disorder</i>

The Interest of Reason Is to Go Without God. Jacobi's Polemic Against Philosophical Theology

Jacobi's polemics against philosophical theology is meant to show that neither Spinoza, nor Kant, nor Fichte nor Schelling have been able to think God as a person, that is as a free, intelligent being. In order to elucidate Jacobi's position I focus on two less well‐known texts of his, viz., A Few Comments Concerning Pious Fraud (1788) and Of Divine Things and Their Revelation (1811). In the second section I situate two key philosophical theological concepts — deism and theism — against the broader context of modern philosophy. The third section analyses Jacobi's polemic against deism, followed by an examination of his positive attitude towards theism and an explanation of the reasons why he, at the end of his life, came to identify theism with deism and extended the negative meaning of the latter term to the former. In the final section, I give an outline of Jacobi's alternative idea of philosophical theology.

Lying to Win—Placebos and Sport Science

introduce an intrigu-ing Thomas Jefferson quote from 1807 addressing “pious fraud”: “One of the most successful physicians I have ever known has assured me that he used more bread pills, drops of colored water, and powders of hickory ashes, than of all other medicines put together” (quote from reference 6).When it comes to winning at the highest levels of sport, it may be the case that many “sport scientists” have either stretched the truth or simply blatantly lied to an elite athlete in hopes of improving sporting performance. If research is correct and belief effects are indeed pow-erful, should lying to an athlete in hopes of improving performance be considered an acceptable practice? What should we think of sport science “gurus” who confidently administer dubious ergogenic aids they barely understand if the outcome is a victorious athlete? As suggested by Thomas Jefferson, history reveals that physicians have been prescribing placebos for more than 200 years in an attempt to make patients feel better.For the uninitiated, it is easy to overlook how power -ful a belief effect can be and thus the importance of this topic. But consider for a moment the insightful paper published in 1954 by Professor Walter B. Cannon from the Harvard Medical School titled “Voodoo Death.”

The Performance of “Pious Fraud”: Reading Passive Obedience in Dryden’s Don Sebastian (1689)

Th is essay examines how obedience to authority structures John Dryden's Don Sebastian, a tragicomedy produced after William of Orange deposed James II in the Revolution of 1688. Because Dryden resigned his position as Poet Laureate after the Revolution rather than swear an oath of allegiance to the new monarch, scholars have interpreted Don Sebastian as the work of a defeated loyalist hoping for the return of the exiled James II. Th e depiction of obedience in the play, however, goes beyond the question of who should pos- sess the throne to comment more broadly on the agency available to individu- als in relations of submission. Specifi cally, the subplot in which the rebel Dorax becomes an obedient subject shows Dryden continuing to engage with passive obedience and non-resistance, a Stuart doctrine associated with divine right ideology and the established church. Dryden affi rms this extreme form of obe- dience, I argue, not to call for the return of absolutism but to respond to con- temporary charges that submission posed grave dangers to the self. Th rough a contextual reading, this essay shows how Dryden imbues submission with the potential for ethical transformation. Dorax receives praise for performing a pi- ous fraud that both confi rms his submissive will and conveys his disagreement with the sovereign. In this, Don Sebastian proves useful for engaging recent attempts to explore how individuals may demonstrate autonomy by willingly accepting limits on their freedom.

Dickens's "Pious Fraud": The Popular Press and the Moral Suasion of Fictional Narrative

Dickens's "Pious Fraud": The Popular Press and the Moral Suasion of Fictional Narrative

Matthew Beaumont, Adventures in RealismAdventures in Realism. Edited by Matthew Beaumont. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Pp. vi+280.

<i>Matthew Beaumont,</i> Adventures in Realism<i>Adventures in Realism</i>. Edited by Matthew Beaumont. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2007. Pp. vi+280.

Between the quack and the fanatic: movements in our self-belief

Separate from the question of whether our patients believe us as doctors is the question of whether we ourselves believe in our healing 'performances'. Borrowing from Bernard Williams' model of truth based on the two irreducible virtues of sincerity and accuracy, this article describes a spectrum of states of self-belief, from the quack who does not believe in his acts to the fanatic who does not 'dis-believe', with ranges of pious fraud and bad faith in between and on either side of a variable range of justified self-belief. I describe how as practitioners we move and are moved up and down this range throughout our careers and as a result of the behaviors of others. The model provides the basis for a critique of the marketing efforts of industries related to medical practice.

Der Feldgottesdienst zu Jom Kippur vor Metz 1870

AbstractCommemoration of a field service held by 1200 Jewish soldiers protected by their gentile comrades on Yom Kippur of 1870 during the siege of Metz in the Franco-Prussian war played an important role among German Jews as a symbol of acceptance and integration into the society as citizens with equal rights. Based on a short note in several newspapers it became very fast a very common commemoration among Jews. But it was a pious fraud of an act that never happened in the described way. Although this was known and already published in late 1870 it did not hamper the spreading. In recent years this tradition of commemoration was revitalized. This time even in combination with a wrong date: the day when the French garrison of Metz surrendered. Moreover, it is described even by officials as an act of traditional religious tolerance in the German armed forces.

Pious Frauds: ‘Honest Tricks’ and the Patterns of Anglican Devotional Thought in Richardson

AbstractThis essay identifies a series of apparent deceptions by two of Richardson's iconic moral paragons, Clarissa Harlowe and Sir Charles Grandison. It uses early modern Anglican thought to argue that such deceptions are best seen as ‘lies’– but also that the same body of theology allows for ‘lying’ in certain cases. Drawing on a range of Anglican thought from this period, it identifies in this literature a fascination with using ‘indirect means’ to bring about the ends of virtue, and concludes that Richardson picks up on this intellectual thread in his staging of morally complex fictional scenarios.

Squeezing Kulaks — The history of a story

The third most recent edition of Pal Zavada’s first work was published which contains a surprisingly large quantity of extraordinary things. It is not simply the first book of the author, but the only one of an expressly sociographic character. And what is even more interesting is the history of the three editions that have appeared so far. For it is not simply reediting and formal alterations, modernisation, but the book has undergone a real transubstantiation. The history of the birth of Squeezing Kulaks is very interesting in itself. In his twenties Pal Zavada, rummaging at the loft of their family home at Totkomlos, found letters, photographs and other documents that had soon encouraged him to start writing. He did not want to write simply the history of his family, but presented the history, lifestyle and difficulties of peasant society from the end of World War II up to the changes provoked by the 1956 revolution through the community of his native village. The first edition was published in 1986, with the subtitle of “Documents and Commentaries to the History of a Peasant Farm” by the Institute for Cultural Research. What is most interesting about it is that at that stage the author did not undertake stating that he was actually processing the history of his own family, therefore he presented the events as the life of a “peasant family of Totkomlos”, of the fictitious Rolniks. He argued saying that he would lose credibility in the eyes of his readers if his direct involvement were revealed, and he also felt that it would be truly difficult to preserve objectivity if he used his own family name. The second edition of the book was published in 1991 by Kossuth Publishing House, but already as expressly the history of the Zavada family. The author disclosed the formerly applied pious fraud and also gave arguments for it. In comparison the third edition by Magveto Press in 2006 has brought about far less essential changes, and here one may meet mostly formal and technical innovations. The contents and essential message of the book are naturally identical in all the three editions. After a brief presentation of the history of the village and the family he outlines the conditions between 1945 and 1949 in the first part. He describes the articulation of the peasant society, its differences in income, the resettlements from and into the village that had a major impact at a later stage, he presents peasant work and way of life, as well as the burdens on the members of the rural community, taxes and compulsory delivery obtaining an important role at a later stage. The second part comprises the period between 1949 and 1953. The lists of kulaks were introduced by

Dylan Evans, Placebo: the belief effect, London, HarperCollins, 2003, pp. xvi, 224, £16.99 (hardback (0-00-712612-3).

For a long time the book about placebo effect was Placebo: theory, research and mechanisms, edited by L White, B Tursky, and G E Schwartz (1985). It remains interesting because of the many thoughtful and detailed chapters about definition, mode of action and ethics. In 1997 three books on the subject appeared (see reviews in Medical History, 1999, 43: 124−5 and 269−70) that showed how complex the field is. I think many people who have followed the discussions about placebo and placebo effect now expected a pause for thought: what are we talking about when we say placebo effect? Is there a definition of placebo effect we can agree upon? Should we simply leave the concept of a placebo effect? Is it too complex and too much of a “garbage can”? In the last two years an astonishing number of popular and scientific books about placebo effect have been published or republished by authors such as Howard and Daralyn Brody, Harry A Guess, et al., Lolette Kuby, Daniel Moermann, David Peters (ed.), and Howard Spiro. One of the newest books that is based on new knowledge in the field, and also aimed at a broader public, is Dylan Evans' Placebo: the belief effect. The author has a “middle of the road” standpoint between the more extreme views that placebo effects do not have any clinical importance and that placebo effects have a big influence on many symptoms that can be seen in daily medical practise. According to Evans, placebos work on a limited range of conditions like pain, inflammation and depression but not on infections, chronic degenerative diseases or cancer. He claims that placebo-responsive conditions all involve acute phase responses. These are responses in the body that involve pain, swelling, fever, lethargy, apathy, etc., often less technically called “inflammation”. Evans argues that these reactions of the body and its innate immune system are not pathological but part of the healing process. The mechanism that turns off the acute phase response sometimes malfunctions and persists too long. So the placebo effect, or belief effect as Evans prefers to call it, should work by suppressing overdue activities in the body. The patients' beliefs play an important role in activating the placebo effect, and they can be influenced by information from other people, experience or logical thinking. An overall explanation of all placebo effects has been shown to be problematic, and Evans admits that this hypothesis cannot explain everything and is merely speculative. But in arguing for his hypothesis he brings the reader on a well guided tour through much literature on immunology, psychology, psychotherapy, alternative medicine, ethics, etc. He also raises the question of whether placebo effects are always good since they suppress activities that normally are supposed to be healthy for us. Something that makes us feel good is sometimes bad for us and vice versa. The book is very well written, it touches a lot of relevant corners of the debate and tries to put up a new hypothesis about placebo effects. What more can one expect? The historically interested might look for better introductions to placebo/placebo effect elsewhere. Evans writes that from the Second World War everything changed; from being a pious fraud, now placebo was supposed to heal people. Did everything really change here? I doubt it. In the nineteenth century also some physicians believed placebos could relieve symptoms, and after the Second World War many physicians were sceptical of the effect and the practice of giving placebos. There is much more to the developments of the last 200 years than a simple before and after the war. Also from an historical point of view it is interesting that there is still no agreement upon how important the placebo effect is and how to define it. There seem to be at least two different perspectives. One is that placebo effects have to do with placebos and can be investigated through research into the effect these have on groups of patients compared with treatment- or no-treatment-groups. This perspective has a fifty-year long tradition. The other is that placebo effects come from the mind's influence upon the body. This perspective has a 2000-year long tradition. These two traditions have different points of view and a mapping of this controversy could be interesting. Evans does not do this, but that would perhaps be too much to expect from one book. It is a good book, but the competition in the field is fierce. Those interested in the subject who would like to read some of the newest books in the field should also consider Daniel Moerman, Meaning, medicine and the ‘placebo effect’ (2002) and Harry A Guess, et al., The science of the placebo (2002).

Shutter Island • Shrink Rap

Shutter Island • Shrink Rap