ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some of the ways in which hypocrisy is imagined, embodied, and gendered in early modern spiritual writing. The long-established misogynist tradition that sees women as natural dissimulators, whose outsides are charming but insides repulsive, is readily borrowed by devotional writers, both as description and metaphor: analyses of hypocrisy as a gap between inside and outside lean heavily on the imagery of feminine deceitfulness. Repeatedly, devotional writers articulate the idea of hypocrisy through the image of the painted woman, whose decorated face conceals a rotten inside. Religious hypocrisy is in one sense a sin of the imagination, comparable to committing the sin against the Holy Ghost, or witchcraft; it exists in the mind of the person who is or who fears to be a hypocrite. Hypocrisy is where the great project of self-knowledge that drives so much spiritual autobiography collapses, as Samuel Crook's formulation makes clear; it is, in a perverse and abject way, a precursor of unconscious.
