Jack Lynch explores eighteenth-century British conceptions of the Renaissance, and the historical, intellectual, and cultural uses to which the past was put. He argues that scholars, editors, historians, religious thinkers, linguists, and literary critics defined themselves in relation to "the last age" or "the age of Elizabeth." This interdisciplinary study is of interest to cultural as well as literary historians of the eighteenth century.

Considered one the English language's most masterful works, Geoffrey Chaucer's series of tales has managed to stay relevant and prominent for more than six hundred years. The essays in this set discuss several individual tales including the The Knight's Tale, the recurring use of irony in The Merchant's Tale, a feminist reading of The Wife of Bath's Tale, the idea of gender and eroticism in The Miller's Tale, and the anti-Semitism and representation of the Jews in The Prioress' Tale.

In the first extended treatment of the debates surrounding public deception in eighteenth-century Britain, Jack Lynch contends that forgery, fakery, and fraud make explicit the usually unspoken grounds on which Britons made sense of their world. Confrontations with inauthenticity, in other words, bring tacitly understood conceptions of reality to the surface. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary print and manuscript sources not only books and pamphlets, but ballads, comic prints, legal proceedings, letters, and diaries Lynch focuses on the debates they provoked, rather than the forgers...