When analysing disinformation, commentators often focus on major platforms and their influence on content circulation. Some also examine institutional media, especially broadcasting. Platforms and media are both relevant; both are important in the communicative infrastructure underlying public speech. Whatever the focus, there is an almost endless examination of issues and suggestions regarding what to do about disinformation. Commentary defines false or misleading information in different ways, compares it with historic practices of propaganda and persuasion, considers the emergence of large language models and content they could generate, documents varied legal responses, and considers what should be done. Here, I examine something that is relevant to that work but often not considered directly.

Chapter 3 explores the language of confessions to explain how language affected religious practices. Ministers expected all confessions to use a feminized language of submission and humility. However, laymen diverged from the language prescribed by the clergy to accept a more masculine language for male confessants. In the public space of the meetinghouse, where laymen confessed their sins, they could not risk their masculine reputations by adopting a feminized verbal order espoused by the clergy. Women were the normative Puritans who fully adopted the language and demeanor of a feminized faith. Men created a more masculine verbal order that focused on their behavior instead of their souls. Through this practice, the disciplinary process reinforced male duty and female piety, which ultimately gendered Puritanism.

This chapter studies the letters of Bishop Agobard of Lyon (d. 840), who was dismissed from the court of Louis the Pious in 822, after having delivered what appears to have been an inappropriate speech. It explores the ways in which Agobard adopted different voices of admonition and speaker positions to advise and criticise his emperor. This chapter mainly focusses on Agobard’s letters of admonition addressed to the emperor and his courtiers in the years during which he was shunned by the court. It addresses the question of whether Agobard was really an outsider, or merely styled himself as such in his letters to get his message across more effectively. A second question is the one that has informed every chapter of this book: that of the extent to which these letters can be situated in the framework of the rhetorical tradition of free speech.