Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe

In this book, twelve scholars of early modern history analyse various categories and cases of deception and false identity in the age of geographical discoveries and of forced conversions: from two-faced conversos to serial converts, from demoniacs to stigmatics, and from self-appointed ambassadors to lying cosmographer.

A Luso-Malay cosmographer who claimed to have discovered Ophir, a Franciscan friar who headed a delegation of shabby fraudulent emissaries from the Orient, a Dominican tertiary''s confirmed stigmata eventually revealed as fraud but later venerated again as saintly, a Jewish convert who was suspected of both demonic possession and of feigned sanctity, poor folk who survived by converting time and again in order to enjoy the benefits accorded to neophytes, religious chameleons who adapted themselves to the surroundings in which they found themselves, and a number of possessed girls - these are some of the figures re-enacting their charade in the pages of this volume.
Twelve distinguished scholars analyse categories and individual cases of imposture in the age of geographical discoveries, of debates over the category of sanctity, and of forced conversions, thus offering a more nuanced understanding of the meaning of identity and pretence, truth and falsehood, in early modern Europe.