Imagining another’s thoughts

Defining suspicion as a form of inference that personifies in imagining motives, this lecture by Lorna Hutson (Oxford University) asks why suspicion’s imaginative range has been assumed to be narrow and defensive.

Suspicion’s emergence as a quantifiable evidentiary category in medieval law, its associations with the Machiavellian tyrant and with the detective novel are all considered, as is the recent literary critical reaction against ‘suspicious reading’. Assumptions about suspicion’s conjectural narrowness are called into question by introducing the close affinity, in Roman rhetoric and Italian theatre, between imaginative verisimilitude and the generation of ‘suspicions’. The lecture finally shows how sixteenth-century English dramatists diffused suspicious conjecture about motives through complex, highly inventive language and plots which engage us in more expansive imaginings of other minds.