ABSTRACT
“Dear Lord Nemessány, I know what I owe you, but for a while I need to dissimulate,” writes Dániel Absolon to Bálint Nemessányi in a long letter on the Christmas of 1678. 1 He enciphers the word dissimulation, becoming a showcase example for present-day research literature that considers the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the par excellence age of dissimulation. 2
