Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies

Shell Games: Scams, Frauds, and Deceits (1300-1650)

An international conference held at the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies
28 and 29 April 2001


from the collection of the Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies

Organizers: Richard Raiswell and Mark Crane

 
    Welcome to the homepage of the Shell Games: Scams, Frauds, and Deceits spring 2001 conference at Victoria University in the University of Toronto.

    This multi-disciplinary conference, which took place 28-29 April 2001, explored the practice of deception in late medieval and early modern cultures and asked how those who study the past can use such schemes as a vehicle to advance our understanding of the intellectual, economic, social and political climate of the period.

    Under the rubric of fraud and deceit, conference participants explored such areas as commerce, diplomacy, gender and identity politics, law, literature, medicine, 'New World' contact, national myths, printing and publishing, religion, travel, and the visual arts.

Participants and Abstracts
click on titles to view abstracts

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Eric Ash, Princeton University, "Manipulating Expertise: the Case of the Queen v. Northumberland."

In 1567, before the highest court that could be assembled in early modern England, Queen Elizabeth and the Earl of Northumberland argued their respective claims to the copper mining rights on lands owned by the Earl. Because the "royal metals" of silver and gold were always considered to be the crown's property, the case ultimately turned on the silver content of the raw copper ore. This left the Earl at a grave disadvantage, however, for the crown (through its domination of the Company of Mines Royal) possessed a complete monopoly over the kind of metallurgical expertise required to make such a determination. Although the Earl's lawyers knew what they had to do to make their case, the crown shrewdly denied them all access to the knowledge and skill they required, and Northumberland suffered a humiliating and costly defeat as a result. My paper will examine the arguments presented by the crown's and the Earl's representatives, and demonstrate how the crown was able to secure a favorable outcome through the skillful and timely manipulation of the rare and valuable expertise at its disposal.


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Steven Bednarski, Université du Québec à Montréal "Where lies the truth? Deception and Fraud in the Criminal Court of the Later Middle Ages."

The Provencal town of Manosque left a rich corpus of documentation from its criminal court of law. This secular court, run by the Knights' Hospitaller, the town's seigneurs after 1209, kept copious transcripts of all trials conducted within its halls. These records served that court in much the same way as a stenographer's transcripts serve those of today. They are rich in information, most notably in that they contain the written testimonies of witnesses called before the court. These testimonies reflect not simply how the world was at that time, but how men and women of that era perceived things to be. Nobles, bourgeois, peasants, clerics, men, women and children all appeared before the court either as witnesses or as accused; all reveal their own stories in often lively words.

Bound by the tradition of Roman Law, the court operated in a sophisticated manner, easily identifiable to the modern reader. This tradition dictated that in order to deliver a condemnation, the judge must have either elicited a free confession from the accused or have based it on the testimony of two irreproachable witnesses. Moreover, the use of torture was exceptionally rare; indeed, there are but two such instances out of a sample of seven hundred cases. In addition to this solid legal inheritance, the court was bound by a Tarif des peines which the Knights had negotiated with the Manosquin community of inhabitants. This list of punishments dictated to the judge the penalties appropriate for most crimes. To ensure that their seigneurs were not overly harsh in their judgement, the community nominated three wise men to verify all verdicts handed down by the judge and to ensure that they were in line with Tarif.

Despite this sophisticated legal and judicial framework, treachery abounded in the court. Witnesses took the stand, swearing under oath to speak only the truth. Yet, each of these people often had their own interests at heart and frequently caused them to commit perjury. Indeed, instances of lying under oath are common in these texts: adulteresses claim that they were raped and then later break down and confess their long-standing relations with their lovers; notaries are charged with forging documents in order to fatten their own purses; moneylenders are accused of attempting to collect the same debt twice; enemies testify against one another in the hopes of eliminating a professional rival. These are but a few of the examples of the lies which were spoken in the court of Manosque.

Each instance of deceit is important to the historian insofar as it allows us to reconstruct the priorities of the liar and the strategies they adopted to achieve their goals. In so doing, they afford a unique glance into the lives and mentality of those men and women who appeared before the court of Manosque at the end of the Middle Ages.


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Dr. Dana Sample, The University of Virginia's College at Wise, "The Deceived as Deceiver: The False Testimony in the Case of Robert of Artois (1329-1332)."

One of the most intricate frauds ever perpetrated on the French legal system occurred in the early fourteenth century (1329-1332) and concerned the claims of Robert of Artois, a prince of the Capetian royal blood, to the county of Artois, by right of his grandfather, Count Robert II of Artois. After trying twice unsuccessfully (and through legal process) in 1309 and 1318 to gain Artois from the countess Mahaut, his paternal aunt, Robert was desperate, desperate enough to win the county through deceitful means. He and several supporters concocted an elaborate story based on a simple premise that his grandfather, Count Robert II of Artois, had invested his father, Philippe of Artois, with the county and that letters existed to prove this. In creating this fraudulent story, Robert took advantage of the scandalous reputations of Enguerran de Marigny; his aunt Mahaut, the current countess of Artois; her primary councillor, Thierry d'Hirecon; and his mistress, Jeanne de Divion, and accused them of defrauding him. My paper will examine how this fraudulent testimony was created and why Philip VI and his court was willing to believe it even though nothing like it had been offered in the two previous lawsuits.


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Olivier Bertrand, Université de Paris-Sorbonne, "The vocabulary of Deceit in Late French Medieval Theatre."

One of the major interests in Medieval French plays such as farces from the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries is the use of deceits as a component of literary creation. The purpose of this paper intends to have a close look on the different major types of deceits: lies, burlesque situations, arguments... The major point of this paper is to focus on the use of a specific vocabulary in the French farces to express the way characters deceive each other. It will also show the relationship between literature and society. The corpus of texts will include the following: Le Cuvier, Le Chaudronnier, Le Savetier Calbain, Le pâté et la tarte, Maître Mimin Etudiant, Jenin, fils de rien, Le Badin qui se loue, Un amoureux, Le Ramoneur de Cheminées, Le Meunier dont le Diable emporte l'âme en enfer, Le Bateleur, Les Gens Nouveaux.


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Mike Cichon, St. Mary's College, Calgary, "Sexual Deception in Early Modern Honour/Feud Cultures."

This paper will examine the practice of and response to sexual deception in the literature and life of Renaissance England. Specifically, I will analyse three works by William Shakespeare--The Rape of Lucrece, The Tragedy of Titus Andronicus and The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. These pieces are representative of a societal attitude towards the proper treatment of women and illustrate the repercussions such a society expected and enforced for the abuse of an affinal tie; namely, vendetta. I will show that the behaviour and attitudes portrayed in these works conform to the theoretical models of feud/honour cultures outlined in Jacob Black-Michaud's Cohesive Force: Feud in the Mediterranean and Christopher Boehm's Blood Revenge, both of which treat feud in a modern context from an anthropological point of view and offer considerable insight into the functioning of feud/honour cultures of any era.


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Sarah Knight, Yale University, "'He is indeed a kind of Scholar-Mountebank': Academic Liars in Jacobean University Comedy."

In his Microcosmographie (1628), John Earle describes the character of 'A Pretender to Learning': "He is indeed a kind of Scholar-Mountebank, and his art our delusion." 

Jacobean academic comedy showcases the Scholar-Mountebank. 

Thomas Tomkis, one of the most successful Cambridge dramatists, was preoccupied with the notion of scholar as liar. His two English comedies, Lingua (1607) and Albumazar (1615) return again and again to the depiction of false scholarship. These lively and witty plays chart the plots of intellectual charlatans against a gullible public. 

The Scholar-Mountebank on the Cambridge stage and in the commercial theatres embodies a shift in the perception of intellectuals in early Stuart England. This new comic type represents early seventeenth-century anxieties about the value of university education, and the seductive powers of dazzling but hollow rhetoric. The Scholar-Mountebank's delusive art provokes epistemological debate and raises questions of intellectual morality. I will explore why this type was so fascinating to Jacobean academics and audiences.


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Allyson Creasman, University of Virginia, "Secret Subjects: The Clandestine Trade in Censored Texts in Early Modern Augsburg."

My paper will examine the clandestine trade in censored texts and images in early modern Augsburg and its surrounds, as well as official efforts to intercept and regulate such materials. Beginning in the early sixteenth century, the governing city council of Augsburg erected an elaborate system of controls designed to intercept and suppress texts and ideas the council deemed to be disruptive. Although the criminal penalties imposed upon violators helped ensure the compliance of printers within the city, the system was less effective against the network of highly-mobile booksellers, peddlers, and Meistersinger who traded in the pamphlets, woodcuts, songs, and Zeitungen most often targeted by Augsburg censors. The often incendiary religious and political themes treated in these materials attracted not only the interest of the public but also the unwanted scrutiny of the censors, requiring that booksellers and printers devise mechanisms to bring their texts to market while avoiding detection by the authorities. Using records of criminal prosecutions of printers, booksellers, and authors of forbidden texts, my paper will examine the stratagems employed within the underground book trade to disguise the true nature of the offered wares, confuse the authorities, and circumvent the censorship apparatus.


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Dr. Daniel A. Brownstein, UCLA, "The Gamble of Mapping the World in the Nuremberg World-Chronicle."

As he undertook the publishing venture of the Nuremberg Chronicle, the printer hired a great number of artists and engravers. He did so to make the humanistic venture turn a profit, but neither author, printer, or audience shared expectations of the standards of Ptolemaic mapping. The variety of maps intended to convince its audience it was both accurate and complete gambled on their audiences expectations. In this paper I will argue that the publishing failure stemmed from misjudging a market of printed books. By considering Schedels work as a wager on the value and the currency of Ptolemaic methods, we can suggest the difficult fit between humanist thought and book production, by integrating local, regional, and world or cosmographic maps. The lack of interest they generated reveal a pre-history of the market for a convincing record of spatial relations.


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Dr. Michael Long, Memorial University of Newfoundland, "The Falconer: Rogue Author."

In Thomas Dekker's 1609 rogue pamphlet entitled "Lanthorne and Candlelight" he chronicles the modus operandi of a conman he describes as"the falconer." A falconer was a rogue author who created individualized dedications for a text that ultimately had numerous dedicatees. Through the use of a portable "alphabet of letters" that could quickly print a dedicatee's name each copy of the text would seemingly have a different dedicatee. Upon presentation to a chosen patron, the falconer would receive any forthcoming recompense not from one but multiple patrons. One of the ironies of English Renaissance pamphlet literature in general and Renaissance rogue literature in particular is that frequently pamphleteers trained their sites on their own industry to expose fraudulent authorial and printing practices, as seen by Dekker's example above. In the corpus known as "rogue literature" the irony lies in the fact that without exception all of its authors freely and openly indulged in like activities, and as such, appear to incriminate themselves. While textual theft and outright plagiarism were nothing new to the Renaissance, this interest in and discussion of protecting one's "property" is. What does this tell us about the status of the prose and pamphlet writer at a time when they were traditionally relegated to the level of the"pot-poet"? Through examining some historical cases of the "falconer" at work from rogue literature, depositions from forgers and iconographic sources I wish to make two points: 1. that this gesture of exposing authorial roguery was an obvious attempt to secure intellectual property and profit in a period of declining patronage and 2. that such investigations were efforts to legitimatize pamphleteering by purging its own ranks of "criminal authors".


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Dr. Brian Catlos, Boston University and Institución Milá y Fontanals, Barcelona, "Above the Law, Beyond Reproach: Minority Administrative Abuse in Fourteenth-Century Catalonia."

Mudéjares, the Muslims who remained living under Latin rule after the Crown of Aragon conquered their homelands, comprised a semi-autonomous administrative and legal community, constitutionally endowed with distinct judicial rights and governed by officials chosen from among their population. These officials, however, came to comprise a class apart and frequently played the role of native oppressor, rather than community protector. 

This paper examines a case, where through manipulation of privilege, fraud and violence, a Muslim family managed to dominate the mudéjar community of Lleida through the fourteenth century, utilising every underhanded and dishonest method at their disposal in order to entrench and enrich themselves at the expense of their co-religionists. The tremendous potential for abuse which these Christian-sanctioned ruling cliques enjoyed comes to light, and the ingenuity with which members of a marginalised minority could manipulate the 'system' in order to maintain their own power, even when guilt was manifest.


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Dr. Gayle K. Brunelle, California State University, Fullerton, "Policies of Deceit in Early Modern France."

Burgos was the center of insurance in early modern Europe because of its wool trade. The Burgalese merchants who settled in the French city of Rouen during the "long" sixteenth-century taught the Norman merchants commercial and financial techniques, including maritime insurance. My paper, which discusses insurance fraud in early modern Rouen, is based on two sources, notary documents and the records of the juridiction consulaire, or commercial court. The Spanish dominated Rouennais maritime insurance, and the office of greffier des assurances, or commercial court clerk in charge of insurance cases, remained in one Spanish family, the Massias, for two generations. In the paper I outline how insurance fraud worked. I also explore the control of the Massias family over insurance contracts in early modern Rouen, and show how the Massias used their superior knowledge, and their language, Spanish, in which they kept all the insurance records, as means to engage in graft and insider trading.


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Dr. Roni Weinstein, Harvard University, "Clandestine Marriage in Jewish Italian Communities."

Jewish-Italian communities witnessed some fascinating clandestine-marriage affairs during late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. What made these stories unique was the way they documented the plot: the interrogation of all the people concerned, and the literary-narrative character the dialogues, very much like Inquisition documents. These stories revealed they way young men used innocent meetings so frequent in early modern Europe (and Italy) to trap women and force them by trickery to marriage. The method was to direct a situation where they were the only ones to have full information, and let all other participants (the young woman, marriage witnesses, bystanders) get the impression that and act of betrothal took place. Later on they spread rumors about this event, or made the witnesses(deceived as well) sign a legal document. Unlike clandestine marriages in non-Italian Jewish communities, no violence was ever used, it was trickery and semblance methods, intending to create to right impression. The young people and the Jewish court refereed to such acts in terms that mean (in Hebrew): play, jest, trickery. Indeed it was, because it used habitual courtship encounters between young unmarried men and women, to impose marriage by deception.


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Dr. Barbara Stephenson, Rutgers University, "All's Fair in Love and War: Marital Negotiations in Early Sixteenth-Century France." 

Perhaps no other interaction provides such a nexus for ambition, greed, and deceit in early sixteenth-century France than noble marriage, which joined not only the couple but also their families. Marriage could define, support, or at times undermine, political confederations; the king often had as great an interest in the choice of spouse as the parents, and deceit and misrepresentation were common aspects of marriage negotiations. We are fortunate to have a small window into the machinations behind noble marriage during the reign of François I, in the correspondence of Marguerite de Navarre. Through these letters, we have evidence of the plots behind marriages based on deceit and fraud, from a rapt matrimonial in which the young groom was the one raped, to the case of a parlementaire in Bordeaux who claimed a (forged) letter from Marguerite gave him permission to marry his young, wealthy ward.


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Dr. Paul M. Dover, The University of the South, Sewanee, TN, "Good Information, Bad Information, and Misinformation: Deceit and Diplomacy in Fifteenth-Century Italy."

With the rise of the permanent, resident ambassador at the courts of Italy in the fifteenth century, diplomatic representatives increasingly played the role of information gatherers, deputized to send regular, even daily, dispatches with their latest news, gossip, observations. The "quality" of the information that these men collected, of course, varied greatly, and they were expected to act as filters, gauging its veracity. 

This paper looks at the use of deception and deliberate misinformation in the practice of Italian Renaissance diplomacy, but with a particular emphasis on how ambassadors recognized it as such and how they reacted when presented with it. It centers on the court in Milan, the focal point of the vast information network of the Sforza Dukes and, along with Rome, the most important diplomatic hub in Europe in the second half of the fifteenth century. The paper addresses how ambassadors went about evaluating their sources (from an array of official and unofficial channels), whether (in the words of the Mantuan ambassador in Milan) they were "a man of great reputation and credit" or "a man who tells a thousand lies". It also shows how they responded in the delicate situations when they knew full well that the Duke of Milan, his officials, or other ambassadors were being misleading, telling them half-truths, or outright lying. Dissimulation was a regular feature of the diplomatic landscape and the modus operandi of the court. It was an occupational hazard, and resident ambassadors were expected to minimize the damage it could cause.


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Núria Silleras Fernández, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, "Three Queens, One Crown: Women and Power in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon."

In May 1396, the Crown of Aragon was flung into crisis with the death - in a hunting accident - of John I. As the king left no male heir, Joana, his first-born daughter and Violant de Bar, (John's widow, posthumously pregnant), came forward to claim the kingdom. Custom, however, favored Martin, the deceased king's brother, who was off on campaign in Sicily and had left the throne in the hands of his wife, Maria de Luna.

In the struggle that followed, three women battled for the succession, using every tactic at their disposal. Whether it was officially recognised or not, women wielded considerably power in shaping the dynasty of the Crown of Aragon in the late Middle Ages, often working behind the scenes, forced to engage in often ingenious and less than honest ploys to gain or to preserve their power.


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Dr. Laurence S. Moss, Babson College, Wellesly, Mass. "Nicholas Oresme: an Early Debunker of Scams."

Nicole Oresme is recognized for his enormous scientific and philosophical contributions to fourteenth-century intellectual life. What is not much discussed are his contributions as a skeptic and strong opponent of the "new age" pseudo-sciences of his day. His penetrating warnings about the debasement of the coinage and his remarks about the folly of believing in astrological mechanisms are worth recounting. By taking notice of both sets of ideas, Oresme must be recognized as an early debunker of some of the scams, frauds and deceits of his day.

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Patrick Wallis, University of Oxford, "Deceit, Medicine and Apothecary Shops."

Purchasing medicines and drugs presented acute difficulties for the sick in early modern England. Differentiating the good from the bad, the valuable from the worthless, and the adulterated from the pure demanded skill, discernment and luck. As this paper will show, the apothecaries who sold such problematic and easily falsified commodities were the subjects of great suspicion. Fears about poisoning, by intent or negligence, and images of the threat a fraudulent apothecary posed to the commonweal were central to disputes between physicians and apothecaries. The paper will examine the kinds of deceits discovered in apothecaries' shops by the officers of their guild, and the guild's development of techniques of surveillance and judgement in the absence of authoritative centres of measurement. It will then consider the part played by accusations of corruption and fraud in disputes over the rights and responsibilities of medical practitioners and the appropriate form of government for the trade. 


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Tara E. Nummedal, Stanford University, "Distinguishing True Alchemists from their Impostors in Early Modern Europe."

The issue of fraud comes quickly to mind in the context of early modern alchemy. In general, early modern Europeans believed the transmutation or multiplication of metals to be possible and many invested a great deal of effort and money in pursuit of the alchemical dream. Nevertheless, even the most enthusiastic patrons and practitioners of alchemy believed that an increasing number of false alchemists lurked in their midst. Authors of alchemical treatises accused less-learned or more commercially-minded practitioners of deliberate deception, while princely patrons executed a surprising number of alchemists in their employ for fraud when they failed to produce the Philosopher's Stone. This paper explores the legal, epistemological and moral distinctions between "true" and "fraudulent" alchemists in early modern Europe. In defining who was not an alchemist, patrons and practitioners exposed their surprisingly diverse opinions about what alchemy was and what it was for.


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Georgia Wilder, University of Toronto, "Faux Female Voices in the English Revolution."

Throughout the English Civil Wars, women were actively involved in protests, petitions, and militant action. Satiric petitions, claiming to be written by women, became a popular form of troping civil chaos. These faux female voices are designed to deceive the reader on a number of levels. They attempt to out-author women's voices by appropriating and distorting the female voice. They also contort and exaggerate the body of their military opponent, feminising oppositional power and ideology. The presence of vocal women transforms into a tool of military propaganda. In civil, or domestic' wars, the private household becomes the site of perceived plots and intrigues. In the absence of a foreign enemy, vocal women, (as represented in faux female petitions), satisfy the need for a militant presence which is other' barbaric, Amazonian, antipodal, and decidedly un-English in its ethos. Images of vocal women become a hallmark of the world turned upside down.'


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Elizabeth Horodowich, University of Michigan, "Gender and Deception in Italian Renaissance Literature."

The relationship between honor and deception was a hotly debated topic in sixteenth-century Italian literature. Renaissance discourse coded women as the "deceptive sex", since according to Aristotelian medical tenets popular at the time, women were physically incapable of controlling their minds and mouths and as a result were naturally prone to lying and dissimulation. Hot and dry masculine humors, by contrast, permitted men to act and speak with honesty and sincerity. A close reading of several Italian treatises on manners and comportment, however, reveals that the categories of feminine deception and masculine honesty were inherently unstable. Writers such as Castiglione, Giovanni della Casa, and Stefano Guazzo argued that political and social savvy for men depended largely on their ability to dissimulate. In effect, worldly success demanded that men take on the feminine ability to deceive. Despite the fact that male writers may have lamented feminine dissimulation and falseness, successful public presentation required crossing gender boundaries. If Renaissance literature claimed that deception was inherently feminine, then women in turn were its instructors -- the teachers to whom men turned to learn the art of deception.


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Dr. James P. Doelman, McMaster University, "'Fathered upon the King': The Circulation of 'royal' epigrams in Jacobean England."

This paper will consider epigrams falsely ascribed to King James I during his English reign. Although his reputation as poet was established early in his life, James wrote and published little during his English reign, however, he often had his named attached to short verses that circulated both orally and in manuscript. With epigrams of the period, especially those of a libellous or controversial nature, "authorship" was a nebulous matter: at times anonymity was essential to avoid prosecution; on other occasions interest in a work depended on the reputation of its supposed author. When the king was involved, public interest was especially high. While many such verses were "fathered" upon the King, his ownership or authorization of them was infrequent. Continued circulation of an epigram denied by the king was a dangerous practice, and public anticipation of royal affirmation or denial, whether tacit or explicit, was an important feature of the epigram culture of the period.

The paper will focus on epigrams credited to James in the early 1620s, especially those connected with the ill-fated Spanish Match. The discussion will also draw upon other instances of epigrams falsely ascribed to monarchs and church leaders in the period.


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Dr. Johannes C. Wolfart, University of Manitoba, "Sex, Lies and Manuscript: On the Early Modern 'Castration' of the Lindau Archives."

Interest in early modern European historiographers has never been greater. Undoubtedly, this has much to do with a revival in narrative modes of representing the past. Few observers, however, have explored the implication of such lineage for recent debate on the status of contemporary historical writing (works such as Natalie Davis' Fiction in the Archives and Tony Grafton's Forgers and Critics are perhaps notable exceptions).

Yet, early modern historians debated with great vigour questions of truth and falsehood, veracity and mendacity, and the like. This paper will explore one anonymous historiographical critique, written c. 1630, of the Reformation in the South German city of Lindau. Central to this critique was the question of deception, not in historiography per se, but in the practice of public record keeping in early modern Lindau. In particular, the author was concerned that the Lindauers periodically purged (or "castrated") their own civic archives.

Our anonymous author therefore addressed (with considerable rhetorical panache, one might add) a preeminent question of contemporary historiographical debate: what, precisely, can historians make of archival sources which have been deceitfully managed? This question, while it may well have originated in the aftermath of the Reformation, remains acute in debates on how - or indeed, if - one should write a more recent German history, a history for which the selective availability of sources is, likewise, no accident.


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Dr. David A. Wilson, University of Toronto, "The Myth of Mother Shipton: A Parallel Analysis of Pretended and Pre-tended Time."

This paper examines the myth of Mother Shipton that emerged during the
seventeenth century, and contends that her social construction reflected and
reinforced a wide cluster of popular beliefs about wise women, witchcraft, and
changelings.  It places her within the conceptual framework of the invention of
tradition and forged futures, and discusses the changing imperatives behind the
marketing of Mother Shipton.   


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Dr. Antony B. Cashman, College of the Holy Cross, "Practical Jokers during the Mantuan Plague of 1506: Practice, Theory and the Renaissance Creation of a Useable History."

In 1506, the return of the plague to the northern Italian despotism of Mantua led to the exodus of most of those able to leave the city. The officials who remained behind in the palace hardly ventured outside its walls for fear of contagion. The result was a sort of urban version of the Decameron, where a group of nobles, this time remaining in the city, were thrown together to escape the plague. Those left at the Mantuan court concocted a practical joke which revealed the need to conduct oneself within the bounds of propriety within the anxious environment of a Renaissance princely despotism. The object of derision in this morality tale was Petro Catanio, a low-level functionary at the Gonzaga court, who repeatedly offended his colleagues and superiors by aspiring beyond his position and even suggesting publicly that he was fit for their high-ranking offices. These courtiers led the gullible and ambitious Catanio through a series of bogus promotions and appointments. The pranks and the responses of the courtiers reveal a set of "core values" which separated important members of the court from the lesser ones such as Catanio. The series of deceptions demonstrate that, despite the often capricious nature of the authority of the prince, courtiers still maintained some control over the composition of the court. The Catanio joke offers us an unusually clear glimpse of the process by which historical figures deployed their social and cultural resources in the creation and re-creation of a useable history. 

Participants at the Shell Games conference, Sunday 29 April 2001

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Shell Games gratefully acknowledges the generous financial assistance of the Consulate General of Spain, the Consulate General of France, the Hannah Institute for the History of Medicine, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Toronto Renaissance and Reformation Colloquium.

Within Victoria University: the President, Victoria University, the Institute for the History of Science and Technology.

Within the University of Toronto: the Connaught Fund for International Symposia, the Graduate Students' Union, the School of Graduate Studies, the Emilio Goggio Chair in Italian Studies, the Centre for Medieval Studies, the Faculty of Information Studies and the departments of History, French, German, Spanish and Portuguese.

 
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