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The Age of Enlightenment was one of rationality and scientific exploration,

but people still fell for lies and deceit.

In this episode of the History Extra podcast,

Madeline Pelling speaks to Isabel King

about the fascinating world of hoaxes

in the long 18th century, from the dangerous to the downright bazaar. Welcome back to the podcast, Maddie.

We're here to discuss your new book, Hoax, Truth and Lies in the Age of Enlightenment. We're going to

be delving into lots of fascinating stories, but before we do, could you kick us off with some clarification of what a hoax actually is?

How are you defining hoax in your book and how would people living in the Enlightenment period have defined it?

It's a really interesting and actually quite complex question off the bat as well, thank you.

There's a little bit of a gap between how we might

understand a hoax today and how people in the Georgian period might understand it. For us today,

we think of a hoax as possibly perpetrated by a single individual or a small group of people,

and it's very much an anomaly. It's something that we discover is happening. Maybe it's an

imposter. Maybe it's a financial scam, something like that. We discover it. We bring those

responsible to justice. And we move on. We don't consider it necessarily a symptom of our society,

but rather a strange occurrence that we can forget about. Now, for the Georgians,

...