This book explores the tensions between text and speech, intention and action, individual conscience and the public sphere in the early modern period. It does so by reclaiming the hermeneutical foundation of hypocrisy as a key tool for assessing the gap between interiority and exteriority, which underpins these dyads. Secular and religious authorities of the time led unprecedented repressive campaigns that brought those tensions fully into view. Analyzing them offers new perspectives on the quandaries concerning action that arose at the threshold of modernity, as well as on the ways human behavior continues to be interpreted today.