Forging a Language of Lies: Truth, Falsehood and Making in Early Modern England

Abstract

Summary The English language contains a plethora of words denoting and connoting material production – designations of Man as maker: Making, creating, fashioning, forging, fabricating, producing, generating, manufacturing, and so on. This catalogue of relative synonyms has, however, radical historical and internal differences of valence and meaning and surrounds the Early Modern nomenclature of “making” with unstable and ambiguous significations. As a phenomenon too frequently taken for granted in narratives of material and visual culture, “making” makes up a nexus of multiple and polysemous tensions in Early Modern language and thought. I intend in this paper to engage with the construction of “making” as a category embedded within theological discourses of “real” and “fake”, “truth” and “falsehood”, in the Calvinist environment of Early Modern England. Using the Reformation disputes on religious imagery and representation, and how these make use of the Old Testament imagery of Creation as a case in question – personified in discourse by figures such as William Perkins and John Jewel which will be at centre of this paper – I will especially seek to elucidate how the religious visual topography became a space for contention and negotiation, of anxieties related to fact and fiction, truth and falsehood.