Description
Book SynopsisWhy was the Renaissance also the golden age of forgery?
Forgery is an eternal problem. In literature and the writing of history, suspiciously attributed texts can be uniquely revealing when subjected to a nuanced critique. False and spurious writings impinge on social and political realities to a degree rarely confronted by the biographical criticism of yesteryear. They deserve a more critical reading of the sort far more often bestowed on canonical works of poetry and prose fiction.
The first comprehensive treatment of literary and historiographical forgery to appear in a quarter of a century, Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 14501800 goes well beyond questions of authorship, spotlighting the imaginative vitality of forgery and its sinister impact on genuine scholarship. This volume demonstrates that early modern forgery was a literary tradition in its own right, with distinctive connections to politics, Greek and Roman classics, religion, philoso
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction. Forgery's Valhalla
Walter Stephens and Earle A. Havens
1. Hoax and Forgery, Whimsy and Fraud: Taxonomic Reflections on the Bibliotheca Fictiva
Arthur Freeman
2. Babelic Confusion: Literary Forgery and the Bibliotheca Fictiva
Earle A. Havens
3. Forgery, Misattribution, and a Case of Secondary Pseudonymity: Aethicus Ister's Cosmographia and Its Early Modern Multiplications
Frederic Clark
4. Marvelous History: Authority and Credibility in Medieval Histories of Troy
E. R. Truitt
5. Forging Relations between East and West: The Invented Letters of Sultan Mehmed II
James K. Coleman
6. Fashioning Noah: How a Forger Turned an Etruscan God into a Biblical Figure
Shana D. O'Connell
7. Annius of Viterbo as a Student of the Jews: The Sources of His Information
Anthony Grafton
8. Exposing the Archforger: Annius of Viterbo's First Master Critic
Walter Stephens
9. Inventing Gallic Antiquities in Renaissance France
Richard Cooper
10. Material and Textual Forgery in the Lead Books of Granada
A. Katie Harris
11. Melchior Inchofer, S.J., and the Letter of the Virgin Mary to the Citizens of Messina
Ingrid D. Rowland
12. "Make Way for the Ghost!" Forgery, Patriotic Mythology, and the Living Dead
Kate E. Tunstall
13. England's Ireland, Ireland's England: William Henry Ireland's National Offense
Jack Lynch
Contributors
Index
