This collection of articles is the product of the Ecclesiastical History Society's Summer 2022 and Winter 2023 conferences on the theme of ‘The Church, Hypocrisy and Dissimulation’. In the tradition of Studies in Church History, it brings together a varied set of discussions on a broad theme, approaching that subject from the perspective of different periods and places. The format is an ideal one for exploring concepts and phenomena across time and space. The contributions in this volume range from Sophie Lunn Rockliffe's article on early Christian and late antique teaching on the devil as deceiver, to those by William Whyte and Mark Chapman on debates about sexuality in the twentieth-century Church of England; and geographically takes in North Africa (Lunn-Rockliffe), Egypt (Tutty), France, Germany and Italy (Sabapathy, Methuen, Maghenzani, Cubitt), China and Japan (Nakladalova), Jamaica and the United States of America (Kinghorn, Wang, Manger and Dickinson) and England (Cubitt, Shagan, Pravdica, Fletcher, Morton, Parry, Smith, Baylor, Chapman, Webster, Whyte). The topics discussed in this volume embrace the diverse types of hypocritical and dissimulating behaviour which arise from the distance, at times the chasm, between Christian teaching and ecclesiastical action or, indeed, inaction. This includes the church's promotion and toleration of racism (Dickerson), and of fascism and Nazism (raised by Sabapathy); its support for and institutional failure to condemn and prohibit the inhumanity of slavery (Kinghorn, Dickerson); its failings over sexual abuse, particularly of minors (raised again by Sabapathy); and its intolerance of different sexual identities and its fostering of double standards (Whyte, Chapman).

The pithy observation by Judith Shklar which prefaces this introduction raises the question of whether the church is a special case, an institution peculiarly prone to hypocrisy. The theoretical modelling and deliberations of the organizational scientist, Nils Brunsson, on secular organizations and businesses may indicate as much, since the church possesses many features which he singles out as conducive to institutional hypocrisy. It has, for example, always been faced by competing pressures and demands by individuals and groups within it, seeking different things. It is, as Brunsson puts it, ‘squeezed between ideology and practice’.Footnote ² As an ancient institution, it has been and is subject to shifting demands. The institutional hypocrisy of the church is an issue addressed by a number of articles in this volume.

Foremost amongst the institutional hypocrisies of the church must be its support for, and toleration of, racism and slavery. Dennis Dickerson's ‘Hypocrisy Defined, Hypocrisy Defied’ both shines a fierce spotlight on the institutional church's hypocrisy and describes how black activists found a way to be true to the gospel in embracing non-violent protest. In the United States, the unification of the Methodist Church in 1939 combined two white churches and excluded the black, forcing it into a separate Central Jurisdiction, segregating black ministers and parishes. Black intellectuals found inspiration in Gandhi's campaign of non-violent opposition to British imperial colonialism in India. They opposed white racial violence with peaceful protest and action, and reclaimed Jesus's own lowly social status in a land colonized by the Romans as a model. Embracing non-violence enabled them to maintain their own Christian integrity while opposing white hypocrisy.

While institutional hypocrisy is an ancient feature of the church, there are historical questions about how and when discourses denouncing hypocrisy emerge. John Sabapathy's exploration of a series of fourteenth-century case studies uncovers the emergence of critical appraisals of institutional authority in the church's failure to live up to its moral claims. The case of Pope Boniface VIII, posthumously vilified by his enemies for his debauchery and atheism, laid bare the chasm between his conduct and his ambitions to elevate his position as pope, for example. Such unflinching critiques of ecclesiastical behaviour nurtured criticism of political double-dealing, such as that of Phillip IV of France and his regime which had brutally extinguished the Templars for their moral failings.

In the seventeenth century, the Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, a division of the papal Curia, actively impeded the implementation of the pastoral reforms of the Council of Trent by suppressing cases of clerical transgression and failing to support bishops in their diocesan disciplinary oversight to avoid scandal. Simone Maghenzani argues that this policy was justified by the defence of the honour of the church, a priority which could override Tridentine reforms and was seen as the operation of prudence, in line with Christ's exhortation to his disciples to be ‘as wise as serpents’ in their work of evangelization in a hostile world. The institutional hypocrisy described in Emily Baylor's article on the bitter controversies over the 1844 Brothel Suppression Act concerns the income generated for the dean and chapter of Westminster on rents from London properties occupied by brothels. This embarrassing fact was used by the first Earl Fitzhardinge to fatally undermine a bill sponsored by the bishop of Exeter designed to prevent the sexual exploitation of women, particularly minors. Baylor also highlights the hypocrisy embedded in the protection of property owners’ rights and that of the powerful by the House of Lords: Fitzhardinge himself was a landowner and notorious rake.

As Baylor's account of the failure of the 1844 Brothel Suppression Act shows, institutional hypocrisy often combined with individual hypocrisy. The Rev. John Stainsby, the subject of Alice Kinghorn's article, was a missionary in early nineteenth-century Jamaica, a prominent advocate for the amelioration of slave conditions and for their education and conversion. His mission to disseminate the gospel to the slave population necessitated careful footwork with the plantocracy to ensure their toleration and facilitation of the mission. He, and other missionaries, needed the financial support and assistance of plantation owners to reach the enslaved. Stainsby thus worked within an institutional framework of hypocrisy, but this was conjoined to his personal hypocrisy in his ownership of thirty-six slaves. The distance between Christian teaching and slavery is glaringly indicated by the production of a ‘Slave Bible’ for use amongst the enslaved, in which roughly ninety per cent of the Old Testament and fifty per cent of the New was omitted to avoid passages which might inspire rebellion. Stainsby was a representative of the Church of England's work in promoting a pro-slavery form of Christianity.

The issue of hypocrisy within the church, both institutional and individual, is an important one. In other fields, hypocrisy may be tolerated or even regarded as a necessary and, indeed, useful tool. The question of whether hypocrisy was necessarily a bad thing was foregrounded by Judith Shklar's brilliant anatomy of hypocrisy and anti-hypocrisy in her Ordinary Vices (1984), in which she explores ‘the mentality of those who put hypocrisy first’ and concludes that such a mindset can impede compromise and undermine pluralism. It can, Shklar warns, lead to an obsession with conscience as the ultimate moral arbiter, with sincerity becoming a form of aggressive hypocrisy.Footnote ³ ‘To put hypocrisy first entangles us in too much moral cruelty, exposes us too easily to misanthropy, and unbalances our politics.’Footnote ⁴ Students of politics and political thought have debated Shklar's defence of the utility of hypocrisy, refining her ideas. David Runciman, for example, distinguishes between different types of hypocrisy to explore its role in politics, while Dennis Thompson argues that the consequences of institutional hypocrisy are much graver than those of individual hypocrisy.Footnote ⁵ The dispassionate debate amongst political scientists has not been replicated within the church, where the allowability and utility of hypocrisy and dissimulation have been the subject of intense and divisive discussion and controversy. As Runciman observes: ‘because hypocrisy always involves an element of pretence, it might be said that all forms of hypocrisy are a kind of lie.’Footnote ⁶ For Augustine of Hippo, lying, whether with good intentions or bad, could never be tolerated.Footnote ⁷ Augustine composed two treatises on the subject, On Lying and Against Lying, and pursued a ferocious argument with Jerome over the interpretation of Paul's rebuke of Peter in Galatians 2: 11–14 for his ceasing to eat with gentiles to avoid giving offence to Jewish Christians, despite believing that Jewish food restrictions were not applicable in the Christian faith.Footnote ⁸ Peter was therefore dissembling, observing Jewish laws without believing in their legitimacy. Similar issues were raised in the Reformation debates over adiaphora. The Bible could be mined for examples of hypocrisy and dissimulation by holy men and women: Paul, although he rebuked Peter, had himself stated: ‘To the Jews I became as a Jew’ (1 Corinthians 9: 20) [ESV]. In the Old Testament, for example, King Jehu pretended to be a pagan in order to assemble the priests of Baal and slaughter them (2 Kings 10: 18–28); while in the New Testament, Christ on the road to Emmaus feigned that he was going beyond the town to which the disciples were travelling (Luke 24: 28). On the other hand, other parts of Scripture were unequivocal in condemning hypocritical conduct, particularly the condemnations of the Pharisees in the New Testament for their false religion and pride. In Matthew 23: 27, Jesus compared the Pharisees to whited sepulchres, beautiful on the outside but full of filth within.

Scriptural teaching and the interpretation of the devil as the arch-deceiver, ‘the father of lies’ (John 8: 44) [ESV], was a powerful element in the Christian condemnation of, and anxiety over, deceit and lying. It was the snake's lie to Eve in the Garden of Eden which led to Adam's disobedience. Sophie Lunn-Rockliffe shows how such passages and their exegesis were used in denunciations of those thought to be heretics or schismatics to portray them as deceivers, diabolically possessed or inspired. Their demonic character was the product, not of their adherence to false teaching, but of their deceit in leading others into error. They were characterized as deceivers seducing others into heresy, not simply instruments of the devil, but his progeny. The discourse of demonic deceit could be deployed by both sides in conflicts over heresy and correct teaching, as Lunn-Rockliffe's case study of the Donatist controversy in fourth and fifth centuries demonstrates.

The continual danger of the deceiving devil, on the prowl to ensnare the faithful, was a sharp fear for Pope Gregory the Great, which was intensified by his sense of living in the last days of the world. The Bible taught that the Antichrist, whose advent preceded the last judgment, would lead the faithful into damnation by his false teaching. Furthermore, the period before his coming would be marked by an intensification of evil, when his forerunners, deceivers like him, would lead believers to their ruin. I argue in my own article that, for Gregory, false teaching encompassed not only heretical doctrine but a fake Christianity in which the external façade of piety masked interior sinfulness. Hypocrites, whose pride was disguised by the show of humility, undermined the church. Hypocrisy was the hallmark of the approaching end and of the Antichrist, the ‘head of all hypocrites’.

The depictions of the Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist in Luca Signorelli's fresco cycle (1499–1504) in the Cappella Nuova of Orvieto Cathedral were exceptionally innovative in their visual imagery. They show Antichrist occupied in preaching, the poison of his error fed into his ear by the devil himself, standing behind him. Konstantinos Gravanis emphasizes how this new iconography of the Antichrist was fuelled by contemporary eschatological anxieties, and argues that the image of debating friars in the Antichrist's audience and a discarded sketch of four demons as learned scholars may have been inspired by current criticism of clerical hypocrisy.

Biblical counter-examples of dissimulation and misleading behaviour, as well as the first half of Jesus's exhortation to his disciples to be ‘as wise as serpents and innocent as doves’ (Matthew 10: 16) [ESV], could be exploited to justify Christian deceptions. The question of whether and in what circumstances it was acceptable to dissemble was particularly pressing in the contexts of persecution and religious conflict and their aftermath. It is ironic that Augustine denounced the Donatists for purportedly advising their converts to deny their baptism in order to gain a second, Donatist one, given the rigorist stance of the Donatists in condemning Christians who had survived the Diocletian persecutions by making accommodations to Roman demands.Footnote ⁹ The embittered religious controversies of the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries raised the question with fresh urgency, with Nicodemism – the outward conforming to Roman Catholicism practised by some Protestants – stimulating extensive discussions over the issue of dissimulation, as well as Calvin's condemnation.Footnote ¹⁰ Iveta Nakládalová anatomizes the different forms of dissimulation which Roman Catholic missionaries to Japan and China were forced to adopt. These went beyond accommodations to local beliefs and customs to concealing the practice of faith, sometimes extending to opposition to the commands of the Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, which required converts to make an oath of obedience, on the grounds that it would lead to their discovery and to persecution of the mission by the Chinese emperor. Most remarkably, Ferdinand Verbiest (1623–88), a leading member of the Jesuit Apostolate in China, envisaged the conversion of the Chinese Middle Kingdom by stealth, ‘the secret and silent conversion’ which would proceed unnoticed until Christianity was suddenly revealed to have prevailed.

Nakládalová highlights the forced circumstances of the Asian missions which could be seen to justify secret evangelization. Justifications of hypocrisy and dissimulation could be grounded in ideology and principles. Maghenzani situates the face-saving, obstructionist tactic of the Roman Curia within contemporary seventeenth-century understandings of politics, where hypocrisy could be regarded as a ‘virtue of statesmanship’.Footnote ¹¹ Christy Wang argues that a discourse of providentialism was used to legitimate and justify an egregious fraud carried out by John Davenport (d. 1670), a leading Congregationalist minister in New England. While Congregationalism required a pastor obtain permission from his existing church to move to another – a ruling which Davenport ostensibly advocated – he nonetheless practised forgery in order to take up a position in the First Church of Boston. The minister not only tampered with a letter from the New Haven church, converting it from a refusal to dismiss him into a permission, but also lied about this authorization. Davenport's blatant fraud was defended by him and his supporters on the grounds of providentialism, that his move to Boston was God's will. ‘Providential pragmatism’ enabled Congregationalists to ‘navigate the ecclesiological ambiguity in a way that most benefitted themselves.’Footnote ¹²

Such justifications of double standards and hypocrisy attracted the scorn of satirists: David Fletcher's survey of portrayals of religious hypocrisy in Restoration drama in England bristles with parodic casuistry. In Thomas Ashenden's play, The Cheats (1663), the character Scruple reasons his way into taking the oath of conformity so that he can accept a lucrative living, declaring: ‘I have found an Expedient … . The Swearer is not bound to the meaning of the Prescriber of the Oath, or his own meaning’. ‘I will Conform, Reform, Transform, Perform, Deform, Inform, any Form: ---Form---Form--- ‘Tis but one syllable, and has no very ill sound---It may be swallowed.’Footnote ¹³

The casuistical justification of hypocrisy is also exploited as a trigger for humour in the joke books analyzed by Ethan Shagan.Footnote ¹⁴ These include jokes which satirize the excuses which could be made for impious behaviour. Other jokes home in on the distance between ideal Christian conduct and the messy realities of worldly life, such as the indifference of bored and deaf parishioners to the pompous preaching of priests, or the desire of parishioners for a Sunday lie-in on the day of rest. The tension between ideal and reality, and the accommodations made by the devout to the demands of everyday life, are highlighted in the studies by Paula Tutty and Mark Smith, which focus on the disparity between the lived actuality of holy men or revered figures, and their idealization. Tutty uses the letters of Apa John, a fourth-century holy man in Egypt, to examine the complexities of his social role, assisting and perhaps exploiting the difficulties of those who petitioned him for help. In contrast to hagiographical depictions of the holy man in late antique local society, which formed the source material for Peter Brown's seminal account, Apa John's correspondence shows the holy man berated for his lack of success and possibly also illicitly profiting from his petitioners. Mark Smith's comparison of the biography of William Wilberforce authored by his sons, Robert and Samuel, with the diaries kept by Wilberforce himself, casts a spotlight on the discrepancy between their idealization of their father and the everyday struggles and reality of his actual life. Robert and Samuel Wilberforce tailored their presentation of their father to fit the social and religious mores of their own day, downplaying his sympathy for Dissent, ironing out the mundane misery of flea-ridden accommodation, omitting his addiction to opium, and avoiding the hard-drinking reality of Georgian political culture. The literary construction of holy men and Christian heroes presented exemplars of the Christian life, a long tradition which surely exacerbated the pressures on individuals to align their inner and outer lives with unattainable ideals.

Peter Webster takes a different type of literary representation, the novels of Iris Murdoch, to explore how Murdoch explored the tensions between the ministry and lives of churchmen, and their place in a secularized, increasingly unbelieving society. Her novels depict the predicament of priests inwardly experiencing a loss of faith while still outwardly performing their pastoral office, and the rejection of clerical authority and ministry by a laity increasingly distrustful of priestly spiritual counsel. The intervention of a priest at moments of personal crisis is depicted not as compassionate but as complacent, an intrusion into intimate matters which serves the priestly ego rather than the individual in need. These priests are subtly drawn versions of the predatory hypocrites beloved of the seventeenth-century plays described by Fletcher.

The tensions generated by the distance between the messy and sometimes brutal realities of everyday life and the ideals of Christian teaching are reflected in preoccupations with hypocrisy. Anxieties over hypocrisy coincide with the prominence of sincerity and authenticity in Christian piety: they form two sides of the same spiritual coin. William Whyte's account of the outing of bishops thought to be gay in the 1990s demonstrates the importance of this connection. He argues that the campaigns by OutRage! and other movements to name gay clergymen and to unmask their dissimulation arose through a conjunction of the rise of gay activism and the ‘expressive revolution’ which ‘placed a premium on self-discovery and self-realization’.Footnote ¹⁵

The primacy of sincerity and authentic faith fostered disciplines of self-examination and personal doubt. In his Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (2013), Alec Ryrie analyzes the spiritual and emotional aspects of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant culture, with its emphasis on prayer, penitence and self-scrutiny. Believers were worried about being stone-hearted and prized deep religious feeling: the perils of antinomianism, self-righteousness and over-confidence in one's salvation were widespread fears. An emphasis on outward fervour led to accusations of hypocrisy by others and also to inner anxieties about false piety. Hypocrisy was identified not only in those who strived to deceive others, but in those who deceived themselves.Footnote ¹⁶ In seventeenth-century New England puritan communities, the importance of grace and an authentic conversion experience led to advocacy of intensive self-scrutiny and, with it, an obsession with uncovering hypocrisy within the heart. This seventeenth-century puritan formulation of hypocrisy curiously echoes the meditations of Pope Gregory the Great in his Moralia in which hypocrites are not only those who feign piety but also those whose inner life is empty, who deceive themselves in their parade of virtue. They lack the constant inner vigilance essential to faith and do not practice discretio, the discernment of good and evil.Footnote ¹⁷ The discipline of self-scrutiny required by Gregory is not so very distant from the continual self-monitoring displayed in William Wilberforce's diaries, which facilitated his sons’ biography of him and enabled Mark Smith's detection of their editorial trickery. Wilberforce critically recorded his habits of sociability and consumption, assessing them against his desired self-regulation, for example, chastising himself for laughing ‘improperly at something rather profane Pitt said’, a confession which today seems amusing but was clearly heartfelt.Footnote ¹⁸

Given the prominence of sincerity in Protestant, and particularly puritan, spirituality, it is not surprising that advice on how to nurture sincerity was offered by preachers.Footnote ¹⁹ Anna Pravdica takes four figures from seventeenth-century England – Nicholas Lockyer, a Cromwellian Independent; the Welsh Presbyterian Christopher Love, who was executed for his part in a monarchist plot; James Oldfield, a Church of England minister in Norfolk; and John Tillottson, the latitudinarian archbishop of Canterbury – and explores the differences and similarities in their spiritual counsel. All placed sincerity at the heart of their teaching. but differed as to what this meant and how Christians should manifest their sincerity. For Oldfield preaching to his rural parishioners, they should concern themselves with the battle against sin rather than judging the hypocrisy of others; while Archbishop Tillotson advocated moderation and toleration, criticizing the hypocrisy of those who felt their godliness entitled them to censure others. Lockyer, on the other hand, argued that the sincere should oppose the hypocrisy they saw around them. His version of sincerity was effectively the hypocrisy decried by Oldfield and Tillotson.

The body of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sermons preached in Exeter which David Parry considers provides fertile ground for his exploration of the integral bond between hypocrisy and sincerity amongst Dissenters. The imperative of absolute inward sincerity resulted in urgent questions about the outward signs of inner faith, ritual and Christian conduct, and whether behaviour and the practice of piety could really be an indicator of internal conversion and grace. The fearful deceits of the devil were such that even those who earnestly sought salvation could be seduced into a counterfeit of sincere faith through a demonic imitation of the effects of divine grace, which could only be detected and opposed by rigorous self-examination. Hypocrisy was ubiquitous, manifest in the overt performance of false religion, but also in the deceits of the human heart. The devil could imitate the effect of divine grace, leading the pious into sinful hypocrisy and his deceptions encompassed the practice of vice dressed up as virtue, such as covetousness passed off as thrift.

The early modern era, with the turmoil of the Reformation, is the period when hypocrisy and dissimulation became major religious preoccupations.Footnote ²⁰ The articles by Pravdica, Parry and Wang, as has already been seen, all emphasize how the central place of sincerity in Protestant piety created doubts, not only about the faith of those outside their denominational groups but also, disquietingly, that of those within. Religious intolerance and persecution resulted in passionate debates about the justification or illegitimacy of dissimulation. False piety was detected on all sides of the denominational divide, with religious ritual and ceremony decried as sham performances, the moral integrity of religious leaders called into question, and puritanical rigour denounced as a deception. Hypocrisy was a significant theme in religious debate and developed as a particularly powerful and virulent polemical discourse. Charlotte Methuen shows how accusations of hypocrisy could be a key component of anti-clerical discourse in Reformation Germany.Footnote ²¹ Her analysis focusses on a vehement critique in the form of a letter written (supposedly) by an anonymous laywoman in sixteenth-century Germany to her sister, a member of a religious order. She excoriates the clergy for their parading of piety, their greed, spiritual ignorance and false ministry, and attacks the female religious for their spiritual complacency and pride. Her accusations conform to the polemical discourse of anticlericalism found in the early writings of the German reformers Luther and Karlstadt, but she shows herself to be immersed in Scripture, drawing not only on Jesus's castigation of the Pharisees but on a wider and more unusual set of texts.

Accusations of hypocrisy in anticlericalism and anti-monasticism both had precedents reaching back into the Middle Ages, as Sabapathy and Gravanis show, and a long, long future. Their fertile manifestations in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England form the subject of papers by David Fletcher and Adam Morton. Fletcher's parade of religious hypocrites in English Restoration theatre includes hypocritical clergy and monks whose sordid lives betray their calling; casuists whose ingenuity can justify any moral transgression, both their own and those of others; and predatory hypocrites whose dissembling enables them to take advantage of others. Religious hypocrites in Restoration drama are not confined to a single denomination: the dramatists lampooned Roman Catholics, conformists and nonconformists alike, and stressed the congruence between Roman Catholic and puritan fervour, incorporating characters such as a ‘Puritanical Jesuit’ and a ‘Jesuitical Puritan’. As Fletcher argues, the use of such religious stereotypes enabled playwrights to launch an anti-clerical attack on religion.Footnote ²²

Adam Morton takes a visual image of hypocrisy, The Turncoats (1711), a print satirically commenting on the readiness of Dissenting ministers to adapt their calling to the new, more stringent demands of the Tory government for conformity to the established church, by depicting two Dissenting ministers at a tailor's, commissioning the transformation of their Dissenting garb into ‘Anglican’ robes. Morton argues that this ridicule reflected the anxieties arising from the new toleration of religious dissent, and from the ability of Dissenters to mask their real identities by ‘occasional conformity’ following the 1689 Toleration Act. Tory high churchmen warned that the church was being undermined from within by the hypocrisy of insincere conforming Dissenters, and of those churchmen who tolerated them. The print draws upon long-established anti-clerical stereotypes, the figure of the Vicar of Bray and accusations of priestcraft.

As Judith Shklar observed, accusations of hypocrisy are an easy way of undermining the views of opponents.Footnote ²³ They can be made particularly potent by the use of humour, exploiting the amusement gained from the discrepancy between outward action and inner belief, or between espoused views and covert behaviour, as the articles by Morton and Baylor show, and frequently, as in the case of the conflicts between the North and South in the American Civil War, draw upon old stereotypes, particularly of puritan hypocrisy.Footnote ²⁴ Ethan Shagan explores jokes targeting religious hypocrisy in jestbooks published between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. These provide a rich and complex resource, repositories of recycled and topical jokes which, in Shagan's analysis, can be used to reveal shifts in religious mentalities. They ridicule a range of hypocrisies, from the tergiversations of those who shifted religious allegiance in response to political and religious pressure, to the excuses made by those who indulged in fleshly pleasures against the teaching of their faith. They often target the casuistical justifications of hypocritical behaviour. Humour can be a flexible and multifaceted tool. Just as Morton stressed the dual purposes of the print The Turncoats in mocking not only the ease and speed with which Dissenters took on ‘Anglican’ respectability but also religious hypocrisy more widely, so does Shagan report a number of jokes that laugh both at and with the impious behaviour described, representing a certain robust scepticism about religious behaviour and particularly about the piety of the professional religious, a type of joke which becomes more common over time. The ‘gleeful irreverence’ expressed in these jokes reflected a shift in mentalities from the Reformation onwards towards a kind of profane Protestantism, which took the form of an anxiety about the meaning and value of ordinary Christianity.Footnote ²⁵ Shagan's analysis shows how these humorous depictions of hypocritical behaviour act as an illuminating guide to changing religious attitudes.

This raises the question of why the concepts of hypocrisy and dissimulation are more prominent in religious and public discourse at some historical periods than at others. Denunciations of hypocrisy were generative and could lead to something of a fashion in polemic. The fact that accusations of hypocrisy breed counter-accusations, ‘reactive hypocrisy’, is amply demonstrated by a number of contributions in this volume.Footnote ²⁶ The phenomenon can be seen in the political and religious turmoil generated by the 1689 Toleration Act, as described by Morton, and in Edward Manger's account of the polemical war between North and South in the American Civil War. Whyte notes that the campaign by the group OutRage! to out bishops who were believed to be gay opened up the group itself to charges of hypocrisy in victimizing fellow gays, and showed the double-standards of the press in condemning their tactic while simultaneously publishing their revelations.

Nevertheless, the currency and popularity of accusations of hypocrisy are more than a passing rhetorical fad. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries represent a period of intense debate and discussion about hypocrisy and about the possible justification of dissimulation. The Reformation and its aftermath were times of profound religious conflict which bred persecution and oppression. It was also, some have argued, a period in which deceits and deceptions, particularly involving fake identities and false religious conversions, abounded in Europe.Footnote ²⁷ Accusations of hypocrisy were deployed by both Roman Catholics and Protestants, and the rights and wrongs of religious dissimulation were keenly debated. The obsession with hypocrisy evolved as new ideas and modes of behaviour developed, for example, with the rise of a culture of politeness.Footnote ²⁸ The early Middle Ages were a barren period for hypocritical discourse: the survey of Latin text references carried out by Sita Steckel and reproduced by John Sabapathy demonstrates its rarity until the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when, for example, it became a feature of the hostilities between the religious orders and mendicants, penetrating, as Sabapathy shows, critiques of secular power by the fourteenth century.Footnote ²⁹ The early development of hypocrisy in anticlericalism can be detected in the controversies between the secular clergy and mendicant orders.Footnote ³⁰ Scriptural and exegetical teachings about Antichrist as the arch-deceiver and -hypocrite, and the prevalence of evil and deceit in the last days, also raised its prominence at moments of eschatological anticipation, although it is not clear how far the detection of contemporary hypocrisy fuelled apocalyptic anxiety or was fostered by it.Footnote ³¹

The emergence of hypocrisy as a major vice in and after 1100 may be linked, as Nicholas Watson has argued, to the tensions between centralization in the church and greater diversity within it. Sabapathy too highlights increasing institutional complexity in both secular and religious bodies, with an increase in reformist rhetoric in both and a critical questioning of their conduct. The charge of outward feigning is, of course, intimately connected to questions of interiority and authenticity. It is a moot question whether the experience of interiority in the earlier Middle Ages was different in quality and intensity.Footnote ³² Certainly, as Whyte demonstrates, the importance attached to the authentic self in the 1990s fostered accusations of hypocrisy against the Church of England. It is notable that while the concealment of gay sexual identities in the modern church could be regarded as a form of dissimulation akin to early modern Nicodemism, as Diarmaid MacCulloch has argued, the controversies of the 1990s do not seem to have used this language or exploited such ideas.Footnote ³³

The shifting prominence of debates over hypocrisy and dissimulation is an area ripe for further exploration. This collection of articles also highlights some historiographical gaps, such as the place of hypocrisy in early German Reformation debates and teaching, as noted by Methuen. The question of the gendering of depictions of hypocrisy is raised by Fletcher, whose survey of hypocrites in English Restoration theatre reveals the prevalence of men in these satires, in part a reflection of the anti-clerical nature of accusations of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy accusations, such as those levelled at Pope Boniface VIII, frequently addressed the disparity between the ideals of public office and the inner lives of those who held it; the near complete exclusion of women throughout much of Western history from such positions inevitably leads to a gender imbalance. It is telling that in Fletcher's overview, one of the notable exceptions is the supposed female pope, Joan. Women were not immune from accusations of hypocrisy (the sixteenth-century anonymous German female writer accuses the women's religious orders of it in writing to her sister, a religious). The gendering of depictions of hypocrisy and dissimulation is a rich field for further study.

The articles in this rich and diverse volume thus offer much food for thought, both to their individual specialized areas and to the larger field of study on the discourses of hypocrisy and dissimulation.