Background Reading

Sharon Achinstein, ‘The Uses of Deception: from Cromwell to Milton’ in Zeller and Schiffhorst,The Witness of Time(1993)

Patricia M. Ball, ‘Sincerity: The Rise and Fall of a Critical Term’,The Modern Language Review59, no. 1 (1964): 1-11

Bernard Capp,England’s Culture Wars: Puritan Reformation and its Enemies in the Interregnum, 1649-1660(2012).

Emma Claussen, Luca Zenobi et al., Special Issue: ‘Beyond Truth: Fiction and Disinformation in Early Modern Europe’,Past and Present, 257, Issue Supplement 16 (2022).

Patrick Collinson,The Puritan Character. Polemics and Polarities in Early Seventeenth Century English Culture(1989)

David Colclough,Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England(2005)

Conal Condren,Satire, Lies and Politics: The Case of Dr Arbuthnot(1997)

Helen Berry,Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late-Stuart England: The Cultural World of the Athenian Mercury(2003).

Faramerz Dabhoiwala,What is Free Speech: The History of a Dangerous Idea(2025)

Leonard Davis,Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel(1983)

Natalie Zemon Davis,Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France(1990)

Clare Egan, ‘Libel in the Provinces: Disinformation and ‘Disreputation’ in Early Modern England’,Past & Present, 257..Suppl. 16 (2022) 75-110

D Eilon,Faction’s Fictions: Ideological Closure in Swift’s Satire(1991)

Howard Erskine-Hill, ‘Two-Fold Vision in C18th Writing’English Literary History(1997)

Dagmar Freist,Governed by Opinion: Politics, Religion and the Dynamics of Communication in Stuart London 1637-45(1997)

Gaskill, Malcolm. “Witchcraft and Evidence in Early Modern England.”Past & Present,no. 198, 2008, pp. 33–70

Leon Guilhamet,Sincere Ideal: Studies on Sincerity in Eighteenth-Century English Literature(Queen’s University Press, 1974)

Ian Hacking,The Emergence of Probability(1975)

Andrew Hadfield,Lying in Early Modern English Culture: From the Oath of Supremacy to the Oath of Allegiance(2021).

James Holstun,Pamphlet Wars: Prose in the English Revolution(1992)

Tobias Hug,Impostures in Early Modern England: Representations and Perceptions of Fraudulent Identities(Manchester University Press, 2013)

Robert G. Ingram,Reformation without end: religion, politics and the past in post-revolutionary England, Politics, culture, and society in early modern Britain(Manchester University Press, 2018).

D M Jones,Conscience and Allegiance in C17th England: The Significance of Oaths and Engagements(1999)

Kate Loveman,Reading Fictions, 1660-1740: Deception in English Literary and Political Culture(Ashgate Publishing, 2008)

John McTague,Things that didn’t Happen(2019)

Mark Knights,Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture(2007)

Mark Knights,The Devil in Disguise: Deception, Delusion and Fanaticism in the Early English Enlightenment(2011)

Charles Lindholm, ‘The Rise of Expressive Authenticity’,Anthropological Quarterly86, no. 2 (2013)

John Martin, “Inventing sincerity, refashioning prudence: The discovery of the individual in Renaissance Europe.”American Historical Review, vol. 102, no. 5, Jan. 1997, pp. 1309–42.

Johannes Müller and Michiel van Groesen (eds)Far From the Truth: Distance, Information, and Credibility in the Early Modern World(London: Routledge, 2024)

Brooke Sylvia Palmieri, ‘Truth and Suffering in the Quaker Archives’,Proceedings of the British Academy, 212. (2018) 239-262

Douglas Patey,Probability and Literary Form: Philosophic Theory and Literary Practice in the Augustan Age(1984)

Margaret Poovey,The History of the Modern Fact(1998)

Anna Pravdica, ‘See sincerity sparkle in thy practice’: Antidotes to Hypocrisy in British Print Sermons, 1640–95’,Studies in Church History60 (May 2024), 238-263

Naomi Pullin,Female Friends and the Making of Transatlantic Quakerism, 1650–1750(2018)

Steven Shapin,A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in C17th England(1985)

Barbara Shapiro,Probability and Certainty in C17th England(1983)

Sandra Sherman,Finance and Fictionality in the Early Eighteenth century(1996)

Laura A. M. Stewart, ‘Contesting Reformation: Truth-Telling, the Female Voice, and the Gendering of Political Polemic in Early Modern Scotland’,Huntington Library Quarterly, 84.4 (2021) 717-743

Jordan E. Taylor,Misinformation nation: Foreign news and the politics of truth in revolutionary America(Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022).

Lionel Trilling,Sincerity and Authenticity(Harvard University Press, 1972).

H G Van Leeuwen,The Problem of Uncertainty in English Thought 1630-90(1963)

Brian Vickers and Nancy Streuver (eds)Rhetoric and the Pursuit of Truth(1985)

Rachel Weil,A Plague of Informers: Conspiracy and Political Trust in William III's England(2014)

Charles W. J. Withers, ‘Disguise—Trust and Truth in Travel Writing’,Terræ incognitæ, 53.1 (2021) 48-64