A Crisis of Social Relations? Deception, Authenticity and Deceit

Week 8

Tutor: Naomi Pullin

This seminar...

Required preparation

Seminar questions

Key texts

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

Primary sources

Further 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 Review 59, no. 1 (1964): 1-11.

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

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

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).

Charles Lindholm, ‘The Rise of Expressive Authenticity’, Anthropological Quarterly 86, 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.

Anna Pravdica, ‘See sincerity sparkle in thy practice’: Antidotes to Hypocrisy in British Print Sermons, 1640–95’, Studies in Church History 60 (May 2024), 238-263.

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