Throughout the period considered here, wickedness can be seen as the core element in representations of imposture. While Natalie Davis regarded the beginning of the seventeenth century as a transitional period from the ‘prodigious to the heinous’,¹ I suggest that the discourse of heinous deception should be located much earlier, in England in the mid-sixteenth, in Germany even in the late fifteenth century, namely in texts on beggars. While imposture is a transhistorical phenomenon, this literature, from the late Middle Ages onwards, marks a change in the ways of how deception and pretence were described. It is thus with false...

State formation, and with it increased governance and litigation, is one of the key processes of the early modern period. Sixteenth-century England witnessed unprecedented administrative changes. The growth of central government aiming to exert its authority over the provinces led to fundamental changes within communities, but its relative success was due not only to pressure from central government but to local co-operation. The most positive and enthusiastic assessment of the success of this process has been subsumed under the general theory of modernisation. Yet historians have hinted at problems of the reluctant realisation and speed of these developments.¹

We might...

A ccording to contemporary accounts, quacks swarmed throughout the country.¹ It is not surprising that itinerant practitioners selling herbal mixtures, quintessences, stones and amulets, merged in the mind of the authorities with vagrants, those, for instance, described in the Elizabethan Act of 1572 as ‘fayninge themselves to have knowledge in Phisnomye, Palmestrye, and other abused Scyences’, or the ‘Juglers, Pedlars, Tynkers and Petye Chapmen’.² But concern over ignorant practitioners was exposed earlier in an act passed in 1512;³ at a time when London was faced with a crisis in public health, some had already felt a need for regulation. Among...

The occurrence of religious individuals who claimed spiritual power and thought themselves prophets, exorcists or healers is not a peculiarity of the early modern period, but rather a transhistorical and transcultural phenomenon.¹ Plato, for instance, writes in theRepublicof ‘[m]endicant priests and soothsayers’, and Origen in Contra Celsum of ‘sorcerers who profess to do wonderful miracles’.² The Bible warns of diverse false prophets as well as mediating the image of Jesus as a successful exorcist.³ From St Gregory of Tours we learn about a ‘freelance preacher’, who at the end of the sixth century roamed several regions of France...

The theme of political imposture involves a wide spectrum of different aspects and ranges, from the famous story of Perkin Warbeck to intriguing adventures of spies and informers; even Cicero’s and Machiavelli’s advocacy of dissimulation, and politicians’ concealment of true interests, may fit into this context.² The Earl of Rochester, under his alias of Alexander Bendo, called the politician ‘a Mountebank in State Affairs’, and commented that, ‘fain to supply some higher ability he pretends to, with Craft, he draws great companies to him by undertaking strange things which can never be effected’.³ Clive Cheesman and Jonathan Williams have illustrated...

In 1703, a young man appeared in London, claiming to be a native of Formosa, and presented to the Royal Society an entire cultural and geographical description of a remote civilisation. How was it possible to succeed in pretending to be of a different ethnicity and engage members of the Society and the wider public for a considerable time? A category of ‘ethnic impostors’ might come as a surprise, for there was hardly a clear concept of ethnicity in the early modern period. However, the illuminating case of the fake Formosan justifies a brief excursion. We have hitherto discussed a...

We encountered characters such as Arthur Dudley, the pretended offspring of Elizabeth and Leicester. Nearly a century later the Duke of Monmouth, Charles II’s illegitimate son, saw himself as the legitimate heir to the crown. These episodes occurred within the context of political insecurity. Rather different are cases which derived from the ruptures of family lines, especially of wealthy and propertied gentry families. Conservative moralists had long been engaged in defending the nobility, basing their arguments on a very traditional ideal. In terms of contemporary demographic and socio-economic realities, however, their desire to defend a supposedly ancient tradition of gentility...

William Fuller was born in 1670 in Kent of Robert Fuller, a Protestant, and Catherine, a Catholic. He was brought up a Catholic, enjoyed a decent education, and at the age of sixteen was bound apprentice to a Protestant London skinner, but he left the Skinners’ Company soon after. Through a Catholic relative of his mother he was introduced to the Marquess of Powis, whom he served as a page, and then entered the household of the Earl of Melfort.¹ Fuller followed the court of James II into exile to France, where he allegedly became page of honour to the...