Equivocation in Early Modern England
Literature, Rhetoric, Theology
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Product details:
- Publisher OUP Oxford
- Date of Publication 4 September 2025
- ISBN 9780198954408
- Binding Hardback
- No. of pages320 pages
- Size 240x164x20 mm
- Weight 680 g
- Language English 777
Categories
Short description:
This book reconstructs the conflicting meanings of 'equivocation' to understand the gripping complexity of how writers, philosophers, theologians, and political figures made sense of ambiguity, and how this in turn influenced their understanding of how language works.
MoreLong description:
Equivocation in Early Modern England: Literature, Rhetoric, Theology explores ideas about concealing the truth while seemingly revealing it. It is about the conflict, whether historical or fictional, between the interrogator's desire to gain information, the suspect's desire to hide the information, and the divine prohibition against lying. The Gunpowder Plot supposedly led to the revelation of the doctrine of equivocation, a secret teaching of the Roman Catholic Church that enabled concealing one's intentions and knowledge without lying. This book examines conflicting meanings of 'equivocation' to show how contemporary writers made sense of the theological-political debates, and how this in turn shaped their writings and understanding of how language works. It is an intellectual history of equivocation, tracing its evolution from antiquity to the present through an analysis of works by Euripides, Virgil, Shakespeare, Donne, rhetoricians from Cicero to Melanchthon, and theological polemicists, including Henry Garnet, Robert Persons, George Abbot, Thomas Morton, and Isaac Casaubon.
It combines a curiosity about equivocation as a linguistic, philosophical, and rhetorical notion that was keenly exploited by secular writers with a scrutiny of the cultural, political, and religious processes that contributed to its development. It explores the impact of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature, education, networks of correspondence, and controversies on the concept of ambiguity. It reveals how encounters with various forms of deception, including lying, strategic silence, dissimulation, and equivocation, resulted in an ever-growing anxiety about, and fascination with, ambiguity. It provides a radically new evaluation of equivocation that, as Macbeth puts it in his final despair, 'lies like truth'.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
Part I. Speech Conceived in Adultery
'Utrum sententia vera sit': The Changing Concepts of Ambiguity in Later Sixteenth-Century Education in England
Human Ears and the Judgement of God: Deceit or Self-Defence?
'Engendering a false conceit': The Gunpowder Plot and the Emergence of Jesuitical Equivocation
Part II. The Demise and Resurrection of Monstruous Equivocation
'What species of monster is equivocation': Shakespeare, Donne, Casaubon, and the International Controversy about the Jesuits' Words
The Afterlife of Equivocation
Conclusion: Equivocation between Euripides and Bill Cain
