Inventing Truth (HI9B1)

Inventing Truth: Facts, Lies and Authority in Early Modern Britain (HI9B1)

Inventing Truth

Facts, Lies and Authority in Early Modern Britain

Module convenors

Naomi Pullin

Email: naomi.pullin@warwick.ac.uk

Office: FAB 3.42 Third Floor (History Department, Faculty of Arts Building)

Office hours: TBC

Mark Knights

Email: m.j.knights@warwick.ac.uk

Office: FAB 3.20 Third Floor (History Department, Faculty of Arts Building)

Office hours: TBC

Seminar Times

TBC for 2026-2027

Aims, Objectives, and Assessment
Syllabus
Background Reading
Module Reading List (Talis)

Module Overview

In our contemporary world, claims about truth have become destabilised by fake news, disinformation, and political lying, whilst postmodernism has suggested that truth is relative and constructed. But these are not just modern phenomena: they can be found in pre-modern Britain too.

This team-taught module explores truth, fact, lies, probabilities and certainty over a 鈥榣ong early modern period鈥� (c.1500-c.1800) through the themes of religion, politics, print media, fiction, witchcraft, social anxieties and the rise of the 鈥榥ew鈥� science. Moving from religious authority to public opinion and scientific and mathematical 鈥榝act鈥�, it examines changing umpires of truth over the course of the period.

On this course we will combine a number of historical topics and cognate methodologies to give a rounded view of 鈥榯ruth鈥� that cuts across neat sub-disciplinary and even disciplinary boundaries. We will study the ways in which the Reformation created bifurcated truths for Catholics and Protestants; how the Civil Wars and emergence of partisan politics placed truth in the eye of the beholder and destabilised the meanings of words; the role of the printing press in expanding the capacity for misrepresentations and lies; and the ways in which new fictional genres, such as the novel and utopias, reflected imaginative uses for truth claims about invented worlds. We will also explore how the witchcraft trials posed questions about whether witches truly existed and how to prove their existence; how crises in gender and social relations fostered anxieties about deceit and deception; and the ways in which innovations in mathematics and science offered alternative ways of accessing truth, whilst simultaneously being contested, disputed and uncertain.

Students taking this module will be introduced to a range of different types of primary sources and online databases 鈥� literary and polemical texts, popular print, treatises, court and state papers, and material objects. The module will focus on Britain and its empire, but this will be placed within a wider context to show something of what Paul Hazard called 鈥榓 crisis of the European mind鈥�.