Shell Games: Studies in Scams, Frauds, and Deceits (1300-1650) (Essays and Studies, Volume 4)

As Michel de Montaigne pointed out, truth's opposite has a hundred thousand shapes and a limitless field. This volume presents thirteen case studies from Italy, Spain, England, France, and the Empire, concerning parochial and patriarchal networks of power. They address people on the margins of society, trying to manipulate boundaries, and people at the centre of power, endeavouring to conserve or enhance their position. But at their heart, all these essays raise crucial questions about the nature of truth as well as its construction and detection for pre-modern men and women. The perpetrators of these scams, their victims, and the authorities charged with policing them, grapple with the roles of authority, power, status, gender, tradition, orality, and technology as they craft their schemes or plot their courses of action. In short, they highlight sites of social, political, and epistemological tension as Europe slowly moves from the medieval to the modern.