Introduction

Abstract

All religions agree that lying is a sin, and yet in the period when Europe was more possessed by religious fervour than at any other time in its history, telling lies and living a lie were more rampant than ever. Moreover, religious affiliation became the major cause for deceit; and perhaps all the more unexpected, Muslim, Jewish and Christian theologians, together with certain lay moralists, were openly condoning subterfuge and justifying the ‘honest lie’ (on the history of attitudes to lying and dissimulation in Christendom and among humanists, see below the essays by Michael Bailey and Vincenzo Lavenia).