Equivocation in Early Modern England

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'.