The War Against Poetry

Literature and the Culture of Lying Before the Enlightenment

“…Literary texts, not being bound by the need to be truthful and so not forced to lead the reader to a definite conclusion, could explore the meaning, significance and effects of lying in much more nuanced ways than those bound by rules of truth and lying. Indeed, precisely because they were already involved in discussions of truth and lying regarding their very existence, literary texts invariably foreground these very debates (Fraser 1970;Matz 2000). An obvious example is Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), published soon after Hoby's translation of Coignet (there is no evidence that Spenser read Coignet but he had clearly read Hoby's Castiglione, and so may well have consulted the son's translation too) (Javitch 1990).…”