Description
This collection examines the widespread phenomenon of hypocrisy in literary, theological, political, and social circles in England during the years after the Reformation and up to the Restoration. Bringing together current critical work on early modern subjectivity, performance, print history, and private and public identities and space, the collection provides readers with a way into the complexity of the term, by offering an overview of different forms of hypocrisy, including educational practice, social transaction, dramatic technique, distorted worship, female deceit, print controversy, and the performance of demonic possession. Together these approaches present an interdisciplinary examination of a term whose meanings have always been assumed, yet never fully outlined, despite the proliferation of publications on aspects of hypocrisy such as self-fashioning and disguise. Questions the chapters collectively pose include: how did hypocritical discourse conceal concerns relating to social status, gender roles, religious doctrine, and print culture? How was hypocrisy manifest materially? How did different literary genres engage with hypocrisy?
Table of Contents
Introduction by Lucia Nigri
‘Hypocrisy, Dissimulation and Education for Civic Life in Pre-Revolutionary England’ by Markku Peltonen (University of Helsinki)‘Trading in Gratitude: (Un)Masking the Self in John Donne’s Verse Epistles to his Patronesses’ by Silvia Bigliazzi (Verona University)
‘Exceeding Boundaries: Hypocrisy across Europe’ by Lucia Nigri
‘Enter Hypocrisy: The Changing Face of the Hypocrite in Tudor Drama’ by Eoin Price (Swansey University)
‘“The ghost of a linen decency”: Hypocritical Clothing on Stage and in Church’ by Naya Tsentourou (Exeter University)
'“Much like the picture of the Deuill in a play”: Hypocrite Texts and Hypocrite Performers in Early Modern Accounts of Demonic Possession’ by Jacqueline Pearson (University of Manchester)
‘“Saints in Shew”: Hypocrisy, Gender, and the Self in Seventeenth-Century Life-Writings’ by Katharine Hodgkin (University of East London)
‘Whether he can be […] any other than an Hypocrite’?: Biographical Encounters with the Seventeenth-Century Printer, Henry Hills (c.1625-1688/9) by Michael Durrant (Hang Seng Management College)F5. CHAPTER ABSTRACTS
