"That thought never ytt entered my harte": Rhetoricalities of Sincerity in Early Modern English

That the first documented appearance of the word "sincerity" in English comes from the sixteenth century is related to ideological developments in court culture, theatre and (most importantly) the Reformation. Orientating itself at the intersection of current developments in rhetorical theory and historical linguistics, this study investigates how these macro-cultural factors had implications for the "everyday" language of early modern England. Using material extracted from the 2.2 million-word Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, several "rhetoricalities" are located and described as evidence for the ways in which sincerity was performed, not in prescriptive manuals, but in actual period letter-exchanges.