Dissimulation and Deceit in Early Modern Europe

Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Tamar Herzig, Miriam Eliav-Feldon, Tamar Herzig

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137447494
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia social

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.

1

Introduction

Miriam Eliav-Feldon

All religions agree that lying is a sin, and yet in the period when Europe was more possessed by religious fervour than at any other time in its history, telling lies and living a lie were more rampant than ever. Moreover, religious affiliation became the major cause for deceit; and perhaps all the more unexpected, Muslim, Jewish and Christian theologians, together with certain lay moralists, were openly condoning subterfuge and justifying the ‘honest lie’ (on the history of attitudes to lying and dissimulation in Christendom and among humanists, see below the essays by Michael Bailey and Vincenzo Lavenia).

As the bibliography to this volume amply demonstrates, many historians in recent decades have become captivated by the widespread phenomenon of imposture and pretence in the early modern world. Montaigne’s observation that ‘dissimulation is one of the most notable qualities of this century’¹ has become a motto for many a scholarly study of the various manifestations of deception in that period. Discussions of deceit are to be found in innumerable sixteenth- and seventeenth-century texts: endorsements of self-fashioning and sprezzatura on the way to becoming the ideal courtier; either condemnations or justifications of religious dissimulation; discussions of ‘discernment of spirits’ in dealing with the multitude of possession cases, or of stigmatics and other aspiring saints; as well as fulminations against cross-dressing and crossing class boundaries, whether by dressing up and putting on airs, or by dressing down by people trying to pass for legitimate beggars. Special institutions and bureaucratic machineries were then set up to unmask impostors of all kinds, and trial records – of both ecclesiastical and secular courts – reveal that the early modern obsession with false identities emerged from repeated confirmations that an ever growing number of individuals were not who they claimed to be.

A few of these exposed impostors attained lasting fame thanks to sensationalist printed reports at the time and to latter-day studies: from royal pretenders in England, Portugal or Russia to peasants such as Martin Guerre, from cross-dressers such as Catalina de Erauso, the ‘Lieutenant Nun’,² to false visionaries such as Benedetta Carlini,³ from arch-heresiarchs who, like David Joris,⁴ succeeded for decades in evading exposure, to poor and obscure crypto-Jews whose autos-da-fé were grand public spectacles.

The panic that arose among early modern authorities who felt that too many people were not who they claimed to be, generated in turn a search for reliable means of identification – with unsatisfactory results from the authorities’ point of view.⁵ However, perplexity concerning the veracity or falsehood as to who or what a person claimed to be afflicted not only pre-modern minds, frustrating inquisitors, judges and princes. Despite great efforts made by quite a few historians, and despite modern-day psychological insights, we still remain baffled in very many cases, even – or perhaps all the more so – when the person in question left an ‘ego-document’ for posterity, as in the case of Alvisa Zambelli, analysed in Adelisa Malena’s essay in this volume, or as in the famous case of Benvenuto Cellini and his fanciful autobiography.⁶ In fact, as most of the contributors to this volume emphasise, since we are unequipped nowadays with the necessary divine gift, we are not very successful in ‘discernment of spirits’ and thus the ‘true’ identity of our historical protagonists continues to evade us.

Out of the multiple facets of deceit and counterfeit identities, the chapters below discuss three types of cases which exhibit the complexity of separating the genuine from the fraudulent: first, religious dissimulation; second, pretence to direct communication with the otherworldly (holiness as well as witchcraft and demonic possession); and third, offers of contact with or knowledge about distant lands.

Religious dissimulation, meaning inwardly or secretly adhering to one confession while outwardly practising another, was by far the most extensive form of identity forgery: first mostly by conversos and Moriscos in the Iberian Peninsula, and after the Reformation throughout Central and Western Europe by all manner of Christians who refused to accept the ‘cuius regio, eius religio’ principle. This very wide field has been discussed by now in an enormous corpus of scholarly works. Those men and women who chose dissimulation over martyrdom or exile, have been dubbed ‘two faced’ by their contemporaries and ‘divided souls’⁷ or ‘hybrid identities’ by modern-day scholars, and by and large the assumption was that they had remained staunchly faithful to one confession while reluctantly masquerading obedience to another. Nonetheless, as the authors of several essays in this book argue, during those troubled times, when all rulers were attempting to impose religious unity, there were many who did not possess absolute conviction and ‘true’ loyalty to one faith in their hearts – or, at the very least, we have to admit that even today we are still unable to open a window into their souls. Chameleons who adapted to the local state religion as they moved from one place to another (as, for example, the women and men who travelled between Lyon and Geneva, whom Monica Martinat describes in Chapter 5), recidivists or serial converts who repeatedly sought the benefits granted to neophytes (studied by Moshe Sluhovsky in Chapter 7), confused ‘truth seekers’ who went back and forth (see Giorgio Caravale on Francesco Pucci), as well as Nicodemites who attributed no importance to forms of external worship, without necessarily giving any indication of what they truly believed –⁸ the souls of all these premodern individuals remain opaque to us. Could some of them have been, pace Lucien Febvre,⁹ secret atheists? The term athéisme was coined in France in the sixteenth century and soon appeared in other European languages, but it was used then mostly as an insult and an accusation, meaning ‘ungodly’ in the sense of lacking moral values. Nevertheless, as demonstrated by Stefania Pastore in Chapter 6 in regards to Italy, people who had practised dissimulation could be suspected at the time of being unbelievers. In fact, the diaspora of Iberian conversos – those who openly returned to Judaism as well as those who remained Christian – was fertile ground for complex identities and for various forms of dissimulation. Hence it is not surprising to find that these uprooted exiles, having to re-invent themselves wherever they went, were suspected of assorted deceits, from spying for the sultan to being serial converts or unbelievers.

The fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries were the heyday of religious dissimulation and of the authorities’ preoccupation with unmasking it, but in certain areas of Europe the problem would not disappear till much later. An issue that was to become all the more acute with time – one not discussed in this volume (nor in Perez Zagorin’s seminal work, Ways of Lying)¹⁰ – was that of the very many European converts to Islam who wished to return to their church and country, claiming that they had remained loyal at heart to their Christian faith during all the time they had practised Muslim rites. Could they be trusted? And should a Christian church be lenient towards people who were not only ‘renegades’, however repentant, but who had also admitted to having lived a lie for a considerable time? If ecclesiastics were to accept the principle that what really mattered was what one believed in one’s heart, they could become entangled in all kinds of contradictions and sail dangerously close to Lutheran solafidism or even to a nicodemistic position.

Some converts – both those who changed their religion sincerely and those who appear to have been dissemblers – offered their services as mediators between cultures and religious realms. These frequently belonged to more than one category of the ‘two-faced’ individuals (see, for example, the multifaceted personas of Anthony Sherley discussed by Giorgio Rota in Chapter 11, or of Manuel Godinho de Erédia as portrayed by Jorge Flores in Chapter 12). Also, certain converts to Christianity were prone to both visions and demonic possession, which could have been their means of contending with guilt and doubts. They too – as for example Alvisa Zambelli’s tormented soul in the eighteenth century – illustrate the wide variety of categories of deceit (some of them overlapping) as well as the complexity of defining identity and the uncertainty exhibited by the authorities when having to pass judgement.

Links to the supernatural: were all visionaries, aspiring saints, stigmatics, and possessed girls frauds and liars? Most modern historians, who reject any belief in the devil and have at least serious doubts about direct communication channels between the divinity and individual human beings, would answer ‘yes’ – all the above were either delusional or conscious fakes. Yet, as Guido Dall’Olio writes concerning sixteenth-century cases of demonic possession, and Tamar Herzig claims regarding stigmatics, the terms ‘dissimulation’ or ‘deceit’ should not necessarily be applied to them. If the persons in question truly believed they had been chosen to convey a divine message or that they had been bewitched and possessed, then they were not pretending: ‘dissimulation’ is too simplistic a term for a much more complex psychological and social phenomenon. ‘Augustine argued, and Aquinas agreed, that the essence of a lie was a person saying one thing while thinking another’, writes Bailey – thus, if Anne Gunter honestly believed she had been bewitched and Lucia Brocadelli and Sor María of Santo Domingo were utterly convinced they were bearing the signs of Christ’s wounds, we should not consider them dissemblers and impostors. In some cases there were suspicions that the bewitched or the visionary were themselves victims of fraud rather than its perpetrators. However, once again, we have no way of knowing with any measure of certainty what were the intentions and interior beliefs of such persons.

‘Travel liars’ is the soubriquet often given to most medieval and early modern authors who described their journeys in far-off lands. ‘The authors [of travel books] were liars – few of them steady liars […] but frequent and cunning liars’, writes Stephen Greenblatt in the introduction to Marvelous Possessions.¹¹ The scholarly debate about the authenticity of Marco Polo’s fabulous tales is yet to die down; large parts of The Travels of John Mandeville are regarded nowadays as mere inventions by the mind of an author who also camouflaged his own identity; Ludovico di Varthema,¹² travelling under various disguises, may well have been the first non-Muslim to visit Mecca, but there is no doubt that much of his adventurous tales was a figment of his rich imagination; Fernão Mendes Pinto’s descriptions of his voyages to the Orient were at least flagrantly exaggerated …¹³ The list of such works grew longer and longer as fantastic news from around the world made every invention seem possible (‘reality strengthened the illusion’, in the words of Jean Delumeau)¹⁴ and the printing press made them easily available to a large readership. It could be said that travel literature was the Renaissance equivalent to the medieval romances of knightly adventures – read by many for its entertainment value rather than to acquire knowledge about the newly discovered parts of the world. And yet, several centuries later we are still hard-pressed to separate the wheat from the chaff in those travelogues.

At the time, however, it was not simply a question of believing or disbelieving tall tales: in certain cases there was a real danger that a self-proclaimed ambassador or discoverer would be trusted with large funds, with arms or with important diplomatic negotiations. Attempting to capitalize on the E...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Superstition and Dissimulation: Discerning False Religion in the Fifteenth Century
• 3 ‘Mendacium officiosum’: Alberico Gentili’s Ways of Lying
• 4 Dissimulation and Conversion: Francesco Pucci’s Return to Catholicism
• 5 The Identity Game: Ambiguous Religious Attachments in Seventeenth-Century Lyon
• 6 From ‘Marranos’ to ‘Unbelievers’: The Spanish Peccadillo in Sixteenth-Century Italy
• 7 Recidivist Converts in Early Modern Europe
• 8 A Hybrid Identity: Jewish Convert, Christian Mystic and Demoniac
• 9 Beyond Simulation: An Enquiry Concerning Demonic Possession
• 10 Genuine and Fraudulent Stigmatics in the Sixteenth Century
• 11 Real, Fake or Megalomaniacs? Three Suspicious Ambassadors, 1450–1600
• 12 Between Madrid and Ophir: Erédia, a Deceitful Discoverer?
• Bibliography
• Index