A crisis of truth : literature and law in Ricardian England
In the late fourteenth century, the complex Middle English word trouthe, which had earlier meant something like "integrity" or "dependability," began to take on its modern sense of "conformity to fact." At the same time, the meaning of its antonym, tresoun, began to move from "personal betrayal" to "a crime against the state." In A Crisis of Truth, Richard Firth Green contends that these alterations in meaning were closely linked to a growing emphasis on the written over the spoken and to the simultaneous reshaping of legal thought and practice
Print Book, English, ©1999
University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia, ©1999