ABSTRACT

The theme of hypocrisy permeates the extract as it circulates from religious to secular discourses, located in the exchanges between brokers and their targets. The current collection takes as its starting point the pervasiveness of hypocrisy in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and is interested in recovering and historicising some of its most notable material manifestations. In Silvia Bigliazzi's contribution, a close reading of John Donne's figurative and argumentative strategies contained within his verse epistles to his patronesses shows how gratitude and hypocrisy gave shape to a codified discourse of power- and identity-trade. Even for thinkers of civic life and rhetoric, hypocrisy was a productive force in shaping one's relation to their immediate and wider social circles, in the court and in the state, as demonstrated by the identification of practices of equivocation and dissimulation. The contributors explore different 'forms' of hypocrisy, and they investigate hypocrisy in its multiple institutionalised, public, or private practices.