it is impossible in the space of this review to give justice to the abundance of insights emerging from the author's masterful textual analysis [...] this book should be required reading for any historian or literary scholar interested in the epistemological and cultural significance of the relationship between truth and lying in any time period.
Stefania Tutino, Review of ... Read moreEnglish Studies
Andrew Hadfield is at his analytical best on treason trials. ... These grippingly expounded narratives, case studies in lying and its justifications, stand at either end of a period in which, the book proposes, conceptions of lying were culturally transformed by a variety of means. ... profoundly sympathetic, enjoyable and extremely wide-ranging.
Lorna Hutson, Times Literary Supplement
A book that wonderfully fulfils new historicism's early promise to read history as literature and not only vice versa... As Hadfield compellingly argues, we badly need a strategy for questioning the historical events that are known to us through documents full of lies, and the only way to do this is to understand the period's pervasive culture of lying since this alone will properly determine what we uncover in the written records left behind (p. 4). Setting its discussions within the context of the 1534 Treason Act (which made seditious words as liable to punishment as seditious acts) and the Reformation (which encouraged specific modes of equivocation), the book proceeds to a series of case studies as it takes in works by William Baldwin, Ben Jonson, Foxe, Robert Southwell, Spenser, Donne, Michel de Montaigne, George Puttenham, Sidney, Marlowe, Thomas Nashe, Shakespeare, and others.
SEL Studies in English Literature 1500-1900
The book's greatest strength is its remarkable detail. Hadfield's expansive approach is the wealth of many years as one of the most productive scholars in the early modern period. Frequently he cites a single page or a short section in a book that is for the most part on another topic-such references demonstrate a remarkable synthesis of his extensive reading in early modern culture and criticism . . . a flowing and erudite tour through the period's influential culture of lying
Renaissance Quarterly
Andrew Hadfield's fine book is deeply invested both in the cultural contexts that lead to lying in the early modern period, and in the tangled ways in which lies play out in the spoken and written word. ... Hadfield's study of lying, like Othello itself, can make for a discomforting and unsettling reading experience; it prompts reflections on the myriad modes in which all of us play fast and loose with truth-telling, in a society where we are quick to claim ownership of the truth and brand our opponents as liars. But above all, Hadfield reanimates the distinctive culture of early modern English lying, showing in action that, as Montaigne put it, 'the opposite of truth hath many-many shapes, and an undefinite field'.
Mary Ann Lund, Renaissance Studies
Hadfield is 'sceptical of how much a history of lying as a concept on its own will really tell us'. Rather, we need to reconstruct 'how lies are produced, how they are imagined, analysed, and understood, and in which contexts they are articulated' (pp. 29-30). What results is a fast-paced book, structured through a series of nimble and intriguing case studies.
Niall Allsopp, Literature & History
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