SOURCE: Geller, Sherri. “What History Really Teaches: Historical Pyrrhonism in William Baldwin's A Mirror for Magistrates.” In Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies, edited by Peter C. Herman, pp. 150-84. Newark, Del.: Associated University Presses, 1999.

In the following excerpt, Geller discusses the frame story of A Mirror for Magistrates and the way it blurs the boundary between fact and fiction, arguing that it explores the indistinguishability of truth and lies in accounts of history, thus undermining its own veracity.

Like plenty of modern advertisements, the phrase “newly corrected and augmented” on an early modern title page doesn't always tell the whole story. Title pages in the third to the eighth edition of A Mirror for Magistrates (1571-1610) would have been more accurate if they had also announced that the Mirror had been “newly muddled and drastically cut.” The complexity of the alterations, along with the sociocultural...