recantern.

1545 J. Bale Mysterye Inyquyte P. Pantolabus Pref. sig. Aiii The rebukes of this boke, wayeth vpon the matter and not the man, the spyghtfull blasphemer & not the godlye recanter.

1589 J. Rider Bibliotheca Scholastica 1194 A recanter, or he that recanteth, palinodicus.

a1616 W. Shakespeare Timon of Athens (1623) v. ii. 31 The publike Body, which doth sildome Play the re-canter . View more context for this quotation

a1687 W. Petty Refl. Persons & Things in Ireland (1790) 73 He being one of the first recanters of the Apostacy from the said long Parliament.

1689 E. Hickeringill Speech Without-doors iv. 29 Heaven is fill'd with no glorified Saints, except Recanters.

1712 J. Dunton Preaching-weathercock Pref. p. iii I have had greater Opportunitys of detecting the secret Life, Conversation and Doctrines of the late Recanter in White-Chappel, than other Men.

1826 W. E. Andrews Crit. & Hist. Rev. Fox's Bk. Martyrs II. 52 A recanter, a prevaricator, and frontless liar.

1899 Jewish Q. Rev. 12 173 Worse still is it when such a recanter..makes fierce and undignified attacks upon the scholarship of those who still believe in a text which he himself not so long ago honoured as original.

1957 P. Jacobsohn & A. Jacobson tr. G. von Rauch Hist. Soviet Russ. iv. 188 Stalin had brought more and more of his supporters into the machine... The number of recanters and opportunists among them grew daily.

2004 B. Zechariah Nehru 285 Early members of the Party, foreign organisers and breast-beating recanters have all written their memoirs.

a1661 T. Fuller Worthies (1662) Yorks. 208 As some have took the word [recant], to say over the same again (in which sense the Cuckow, of all Birds, is properly called the Recanter).