15 May 2024
Kilian Schinder (Fribourg) is the winner of the REFORC Book Award 2024. He received the award for his book Religious Dissimulation and Early Modern Drama. We spoke to Kilian about it.
Kilian, you wrote a book on an original topic. Can you briefly say what your book is about?
My book deals with practices of religious dissimulation and conformity in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, which were adopted, to a greater or lesser extent, by a significant number of Catholic and Protestant dissenters who found themselves at odds with the Protestant Church of England. More specifically, I bring the controversies surrounding such dissimulation into dialogue with the one cultural institution that had actually made dissimulation its raison d’être: the theatre. I trace the shared theological and philosophical traditions concerning lying and dissimulation that informed controversies on religious dissimulation as well as theatrical dissimulation, and I argue that the theatre’s mode of representation, rather than being a neutral medium, was thus already deeply implied in pressing contemporary debates on religious dissimulation. In my analyses of a number of plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, which dramatise religious dissimulation across the confessional spectrum, I scrutinise the various ways in which the theatre positioned itself vis-à-vis such debates and simultaneously reflected on the political and religious implications of its own medium.
The subtitle of your book is referring to toleration. How do dissimulation and toleration relate in your study?
Dissimulation could be an unintended consequence of intolerance when dissenters conformed with the dominant confession in order to avoid legal discrimination. However, dissimulation could also be the object of toleration or intolerance, respectively. A case in point is Queen Elizabeth’s alleged refusal to probe the inner lives of her potentially dissembling subjects, as long as they outwardly conformed to the Established Church. However, I am interested in the pressure points of such policies, e.g. in cases in which religious dissent was associated with treason and such toleration was perceived to be untenable. In turn, the spokesmen of persecuted minorities, too, often warned their flocks against outward conformity with idolatrous rites. Dissimulation is thus an underappreciated but central aspect of the often makeshift policies of the early modern state in regulating religious pluralism before the latter’s legal recognition in the secular or multiconfessional state.
What struck you most in studying this topic?
I was particularly struck by the amount and complexity of infighting on questions concerning dissimulation within minority groups, as well as the broad ideological range of opinions that were voiced on the subject in London’s commercial theatres. Although often considered a vaguely conservative or centrist institution in its religious orientation, the early modern theatre’s ideological flexibility is thus easily underestimated in this regard.
Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
I am an assistant professor in early modern English literature at the University of Fribourg, and most of my research focuses on the drama of Shakespeare and his contemporaries. However, I am also co-editor of a new, critical edition of Sebastian Castellio’s pioneering plea for religious toleration from 1554, De haereticis an sint persequendi (Schwabe Verlag 2024), and have recently worked on early modern translation (e.g. Niccolò Machiavelli and John Milton) as well.
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Thank you for the interview, Kilian! Wishing you all the best for your continued research.
