This article examines the connections in late antique Christian thought between the ideas that heretics were inspired by the devil, and that the devil was a liar. It begins by showing that the association of the devil with lies was founded on scriptural exegesis, and that Scripture was regularly deployed in heresiologies to cement the links between the devil as ‘father of lies’, and heretics and schismatics as liars in Satan's image. It then offers a detailed case study of when, where and how accusations of direct and indirect diabolical dissimulation were made by the opposing parties of the ‘Donatist controversy’ in polemical texts produced primarily for their own side. The final part considers how these accusations were modulated in invented textual dialogues and in oral debates between the two sides, showing how direct accusations of diabolical activity made against opponents were often eschewed for more subtle insinuations of diabolical association.

Hagiographical writing promotes a vision of Egyptian monasticism in which pious ascetic figures are isolated from the world. Peter Brown highlighted the role of the holy man as patron, but nonetheless reinforced a traditional view of Egyptian monasticism based on his readings of works such as the sixth-century Aphothegmata Patrum. Surviving monastic correspondence, in contrast, demonstrates that there was a highly individualized approach to the monastic vocation. In this article, I turn to documentary material to consider the complexities of the early development of the movement. As a case study, I use the Greek and Coptic correspondence of a fourth-century monk called Apa John. My conclusion is that activities and behaviours described in the texts do not always accord with any known typology or ideal, but they are invaluable for exploring aspects of the early monastic impulse and the role played by the movement in wider society.

This article examines the use of the concepts of hypocrisy and the hypocrite in the writings of Pope Gregory the Great (590–604) and Archbishop Wulfstan of York (1002–23). Although separated by many centuries, these two treatments are connected through Wulfstan's debt to Gregory's ideas on the evil of hypocrisy, and particularly in his depiction of Antichrist as the chief of all hypocrites. Both use the idea of hypocrisy to critique their contemporary situation: for Gregory, the pride of the Patriarch John IV of Constantinople in adopting the title ‘Ecumenical Patriarch’; and for Wulfstan, the court politics in the turbulent final years of the reign of Æthelred the Unready.

The status of hypocrisy as a vice has varied historically, but analysis has tended to stress the issue in relation to individuals, rather than institutions. Taking Judith Shklar and Boccaccio as points of departure, this article explores how and why hypocrisy mattered in the context of the early fourteenth-century church. Analysing charges of hypocrisy made by and against Pope Boniface VIII at the papal Curia; Angelo Clareno within the Franciscan Order; and the later Capetian court in relation to the Roman de Fauvel allows us to see how anxiety about hypocrisy became especially acute across a range of early fourteenth institutions. Contemporaries questioned what their institutions meant and increasingly put their claims to the test, often in heightened apocalyptic terms. In and around the early fourteenth-century church, worry about institutional hypocrisy shows how responsibility was increasingly on trial.

This article discusses the iconography of Luca Signorelli's Sermon and Deeds of the Antichrist (c.1502–3) in the Cappella Nuova at the cathedral of Orvieto. A combined investigation of the Antichrist's subject matter, Signorelli's literary and visual sources, as well as his discarded drawings for the entire fresco decoration of the Cappella Nuova, brings fresh insights to the thematic intentions of the artist and his advisers. Signorelli's entire view of eschatology marked a renewed interest of Italian artists in the apocalyptic sublime. It also signified a revival of the medieval tradition of the Antichrist as the arch-hypocrite, and his reign as an apocalyptic age of hypocrisy. At the same time, the artist's treatment of the subject matter indicates an ambiguous stance toward religious hypocrisy characterized by a suppression of the anti-clerical and millenarian aspects of the Antichrist myth.

In 1524, two anonymous pamphlets were published, both professing to be letters written by a married woman to her sister, a nun. Both draw on a range of New Testament texts to express criticism of ‘the hypocrites’, a term the anonymous author uses to refer particularly to clergy and religious. This article examines how the author of these pamphlets constructed and characterized the category of the hypocrite. Drawing on the work of Hans-Christoph Rublack, the article shows that her critique is coherent with anti-clerical rhetoric found in a wide range of early Reformation pamphlets. It then compares her strictures on hypocrisy with references to hypocrisy and hypocrites in the early German writings of Martin Luther and Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt to explore the extent to which accusations of hypocrisy were entwined with anti-clerical and anti-monastic rhetoric in the early Lutheran Reformation. It concludes that while accusations against clergy and religious were often couched in terms of their hypocrisy, Luther's use of the term hypocrite was much broader, extending to all those whom he viewed as presenting themselves as ‘holier than thou’, while Karlstadt made less use of the term.

This article examines jokes about religion, particularly religious hypocrisy, in early modern English jestbooks, from the 1520s to the 1740s. It argues that over the course of England's Long Reformation, we find more and more jokes in which the solution, or alternative, to hypocrisy is not a more robust faith, making the inward heart correspond to one's outward show of religion, but rather a more profane Christianity, making one's outward face correspond to an all-too-human and worldly heart. Jokes about religious hypocrisy thus betray both a deep anxiety about piety, and the emergence of a profane species of Protestantism.

This volume aims to explore the concepts of hypocrisy and dissimulation, conceived in the framework of the ‘tensions at the heart of Christian teaching and experience’. This tension primarily points towards a conflict between ideal and lived practice; however, in certain circumstances, dissimulation and deceit might be understood as legitimate responses to a given situation. This article examines significant aspects of dissimulation in the specific case of early modern missions in China and Japan at the end of the sixteenth and throughout the seventeenth century, where missionaries often had to resort to disguise and concealment. Many of them had to overcome immense difficulties just to enter the country; some had to evangelize in secret, living in constant fear and facing ongoing persecution. In these territories, the ‘policy of deceit’ therefore became a relevant part of the proselytizing enterprise. I examine these practices of dissimulation with regard to evangelization strategies, and relate them to the sincerity and the confession of the faith, two of the central problems of the Christian credo. I argue that dissimulation was perceived, by the missionaries, as a legitimate and tactical response to the challenging and complex circumstances of the Japanese and Chinese missions in this period.

The article argues that the post-Tridentine papacy was more focused on maintaining its own centrality than on implementing the reforms established by the Council of Trent. It shows that the Roman Curia often undermined its own bishops and interfered with their efforts to reform their dioceses. This practice – which might be perceived as hypocritical by us and was viewed as such by some contemporary commentators – was seen as justified by the baroque political virtue of ‘prudence’, and the idea of bishops being the conscience keepers of their dioceses. The article, in pondering the theme of hypocrisy, explores the work of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Regulars, which was responsible for overseeing the episcopate and religious orders. It uses previously unnoticed sources from the Bodleian Library in Oxford to show how the Congregation operated and how it perceived its role in defending the rights of the church and its clergy.

Seventeenth-century British preachers persistently defined hypocrisy in contrast to its divine antidote: sincerity. This article looks at four such case studies from across the ‘puritan’-‘Anglican’ divide, analysing the sermons of the Independent Nicholas Lockyer, the Presbyterian Christopher Love, the Church of England clergyman James Oldfield, and the archbishop of Canterbury John Tillotson. It considers to what extent Protestant instruction on sincerity and hypocrisy shifted according to religious affiliation and socio-political context, arguing that although these sermons possessed considerable continuities in their theological underpinnings, they also exhibited divergences in focus and instruction that are sometimes, but not always, predictable along denominational lines. These differences held weighty implications for the individual receiving spiritual guidance on how to forswear hypocrisy and live a truly sincere life, particularly throughout the period of instability and contention that marked Britain from the Civil Wars to the Glorious Revolution.

Many scholars have told the story of how John Davenport (bap. 1597, d. 1670), a prominent Congregationalist minister in New England, was fatally discredited as a fraudster when a letter he had forged was exposed in 1669. However, no one has analyzed how this extraordinary scandal fits into the larger narrative of puritan providentialism and its disenchantment. Focusing on the manipulation of providential language, this article shows that intra-Congregationalist conflicts over church polity could often be more political than theological. God-talk, or ‘providential pragmatism’, empowered New Englanders to navigate the ecclesiological ambiguities inherent in the Congregational system in a way that most benefited themselves. Davenport's scandal, precisely because it was the most blatant form of such pragmatism, offers a case study of a pattern of self-contradiction and double standard already observable in similar cases of schisms over church membership and infant baptism in late seventeenth-century New England.

This article explores the various manifestations of religious hypocrisy to be found in new plays written in England between 1660 and 1720. It shows how the dramatists used hypocrisy both as a polemical weapon at times of religious conflict, and as an engaging form of theatricality. Exploring hypocrisy through drama is apposite as many of the key characteristics of hypocrisy – masks, role-playing, disguise and dissimulation – have been features of the theatre since ancient Greek times. The post-Restoration dramatists created worlds of masquerade for their hypocritical characters to inhabit, while the plays themselves offer examples of unselfconscious casuists, disreputable clerics, predatory monsters, and those who dissimulate religious beliefs, or have none at all.

This article considers The Turncoats (1711), an anti-Dissent graphic satire published after the Tory victory in the 1710 General Election. The print ridiculed the hypocrisy of those Dissenters who abandoned their principles and conformed to the Church of England after that election, and pointed to the pervasiveness of religious hypocrisy in early eighteenth-century England more generally. This article contextualizes the print within the tense religious and political rivalries that developed after the 1688 Revolution and the trial of Henry Sacheverell. The Turncoats’ ridicule resonated because it built on older traditions of stereotypes in anti-popery and anti-puritanism, which used mockery to attack those perceived to be hypocrites. Mockery is analyzed by considering how early modern culture understood laughter. It is argued that ridicule in The Turncoats expressed superiority over hypocrites by subjecting them to contempt and provided relief from anxieties about the prevalence of hypocrisy during the rage of parties.

This article explores the theme of hypocrisy in a multi-volume collection of hitherto unstudied manuscript sermons by Exeter Dissenting ministers from the Restoration to the mid-eighteenth century, held by the Devon and Exeter Institution. In these sermons, the theme of hypocrisy is addressed in a variety of senses and contexts, including the imposition by conformists of forms of worship not required by Scripture; the false accusations of hypocrisy made against Dissenters; the insincere performance of piety; the tendency of sinners to justify vice as virtue and virtue as vice; and the incompatibility of persecution with true New Testament Christianity. These sermons trace a move from Reformed orthodoxy towards rational Dissent, with a soteriology that increasingly makes moral performance a condition of final salvation. The possibility of insincere performance of piety and virtue by hypocrites may have created increased anxiety in a context in which soteriology and ethics were increasingly entangled.

First dispatched to Jamaica in 1818 by The Conversion Society, the Rev. John Stainsby became a prominent figure on the island. This article examines his intense involvement in Anglican missionary affairs to reveal how dishonesties and concealment of belief were used to expand Anglican missions in the Caribbean. Firstly, this article examines two key sites of contention between missionaries and the plantocracy – Sunday markets and baptism – where Stainsby used deception to reconcile his religious duties and colonial law. Secondly, it considers the motivations and actions of The Conversion Society and the Church Missionary Society more generally, including the heavily censored material used for religious instruction. Finally, it examines Stainsby as an enslaver, and considers the religious justifications used to support enslavement by many resident Anglican clergymen in the early nineteenth century.

In 1838, Robert and Samuel Wilberforce published, in five volumes, The Life of William Wilberforce. Although the subject of some contemporary controversy, this work, containing extensive quotations from his diaries, rapidly established itself as the principal source for subsequent biographical writings about Wilberforce and strongly influenced later interpretations. The production of a complete initial transcription of the diaries by the Wilberforce Diaries Project for the first time enables a systematic comparison between the Life and its principal source. This reveals a systematic attempt by his sons to minimize references to Wilberforce's participation in some aspects of Hanoverian sociability, his use of medication to deal with his worsening health, his close associations with and respect for Nonconformists and his own evangelical commitment and spirituality. As a consequence, the Wilberforce we know from the biography is as much a product of early Victorian myth-making as the Wilberforce of 1759–1833.

The House of Lords debate over the 1844 Brothel Suppression Bill was derailed by an accusation of hypocrisy. An opponent of the measure, Earl Fitzhardinge, shifted attention from legal reform to the notorious brothels operating on Church of England property, and argued that the dean and chapter of Westminster Abbey should be prosecuted were the bill to become law. In addition to offering an interesting case study of clerical hypocrisy in practice, the story of the failed 1844 Bill provides useful context for better-known sexual reform projects of the late nineteenth century. This article focuses on three major themes that animated the events of 1844: the power of distraction and delay; the role of elite male perspectives; and the complicated but critical role of Christianity in sexual reform.

During the antebellum period and American Civil War, ‘puritan’ was a contested identity, fraught with layers of meaning and interpretation. Historians have charted the ways Southern intellectuals cast the differences between North and South as an outplaying of the old conflict between Cavalier and puritan. This article highlights the ways Southern ministers claimed the puritan identity for the South and accused the North of hypocrisy, for having fallen far from the theological ideals of their puritan forebears. Furthermore, Southern ministers noted the hypocrisy of Northern puritans for having escaped religious tyranny only to impose it upon those who did not conform to their form of Christianity; they had thus fallen into the very sin which they had decried. This came from Southern ministers whose attempt to appropriate the memory of puritanism as liberty-loving revealed their own hypocrisy in fighting for the ‘liberty’ to maintain a system of racial slavery.

This article begins by outlining the changing approach in Anglican attitudes to contraception at the Lambeth Conference of 1930, where birth control was permitted for married couples and sex separated from the possibility of procreation. The logical extension of this teaching, as was noted by Bishop Charles Gore, was that other forms of sexual pleasure, including homosexuality, which was increasingly seen as a ‘natural’ condition, might eventually be sanctioned by the church. Later in the 1930s, a series of letters by Robert Reid to Cosmo Gordon Lang, archbishop of Canterbury, shows the beginnings of a campaign for a change of policy. At the outbreak of the Second World War, the Anglican writer Kenneth Ingram published Sex-Morality Tomorrow, which pressed for full homosexual equality and provoked calls to William Temple to suppress the book. 1940 proved an inopportune moment for reform of church teaching on homosexuality, which continues to elicit widespread controversy.