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20.10.07 Stephens/Havens (eds.), Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe

20.10.07 Stephens/Havens (eds.), Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe


The volume of essays under review is intended to introduce and complement the Bibliotheca Fictiva, the library of literary fakes acquired by Johns Hopkins University in 2012 from its original collectors, Arthur and Janet Freeman. Many of the papers were presented at the conference held to inaugurate the Bibliotheca's acquisition; and all take inspiration, directly or indirectly, from the library's contents.

The Freemans' interest in forgery was piqued by research into the life John Payne Collier, one of the most (in)famous forgers of Shakespearean works. Arthur himself began life as an academic, only later embarking on a career as a rare book salesman; and the Bibliotheca reflects this varied career. It is the most comprehensive collection dedicated to literary deception, brought together by Arthur and Janet with loving diligence over the course of over four decades. What is offered here, however, is not a catalogue of the Bibliotheca--that can be found elsewhere--but a thematic introduction into the fascinating world of falsification which it so wonderfully exemplifies.

After a general introduction by Walter Stephens and Earl A. Havens--the latter now the curator of the Bibliotheca at Johns Hopkins--we are first presented with two essays on the collection itself. In the first, Arthur Freeman explains the principles which informed his and his wife's acquisitions, providing privileged insight into how the library came into being. In the second, Havens offers a rich panorama of the contents of the Bibliotheca, lighting upon many of its finest exemplars. Here one begins to sense the true research potential of the collection, a potential one can but hope will be exploited fully in years to come.

Thereafter we proceed roughly chronologically through different European forgeries, some represented by the Bibliotheca, others to be found elsewhere. The focus is avowedly early modern, as befits the title (and the contents of the Bibliotheca), but the ancient and medieval worlds are not left entirely out in the cold. In the third chapter, Frederic Clark introduces us to the fascinating world and fate of the early medieval cosmography attributed to Aethicus Ister. As he notes, the Cosmography is a literary forgery, produced (probably) in the eighth century in the name of a purported Istrian cosmographer (the elusive Aethicus). In the early modern period, the waters would be further muddied by the mistaken attribution of an entirely different work to this same Aethicus. Clark is alive to the irony here, and rightly emphasizes that Aethicus' reception and misattribution (secondary pseudonymity, as he calls it) presents a picture of "profound if silent continuity." Clark's is a truly bravura performance, which will be welcomed by medievalists and early modernists alike. The other medieval contribution, that of Elly Truitt, takes a subtly different tack. In the fourth chapter, she focuses her attention less on forgery than on themes of authority and credulity, as explored in medieval accounts of Troy's fate (accounts which themselves derive from the forged narratives of Dares and Dictys). The main point here is that marvels offer a valuable perspective on concepts of truth and fiction--and how these might be contested.

We then turn to the early modern world, where Clark had placed Aethicus' reception. In chapter 5, James Coleman introduces us to the epistles forged in the name of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, who earned infamy in Europe for his capture of Constantinople in 1453. As is often the case, the eager reception of these fakes attests as much to European society's desire to be deceived as to the forger's skill. The next three chapters, by Shana O'Connell, Anthony Grafton and Walter Stephens, are dedicated to that most famous of early modern forgers, Annius of Viterbo (alias Giovanni Nanni). None of these fundamentally challenges received wisdom, but each furnishes important new insights into the Italian master forger's sources, reception and modus operandi, ranging from his use of Propertius (O'Connell), to his purported Hebrew sources (Grafton), to his debunking at the hands of Gaspar Barreiros (Stephens). We then leave Italy for a time, taking in similar efforts to forge Gallic Antiquities in France (Richard Cooper) and early Christian narratives in Grenada (Katie Harris). Here we can observe how longstanding methods of falsification (such as psdeudonymity) were combined with a new-found interest in the material record. Returning to the Apennine Peninsula, in the eleventh chapter Ingrid Rowland reminds us that forgery and credulity are frequently either side of the same coin. The same Melchior Inchofer who debunked Curzio Inghirami's Etruscan antiquities in 1633 (about which Rowland has written so insightfully elsewhere) had earlier been responsible for a four-hundred-page (!) defence of the apocryphal "Letter of the Virgin Mary to the People of Messina." For the learned Austrian Jesuit, believing was evidently seeing. Finally, studies by Kate Tunstall and Jack Lynch take the story into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, examining the resonances of forgery and imposture in France and England on the cusp of modernity.

Taken together, these contributions offer a welcome tour d'horizon of European forgers and forgery. The focus is largely early modern (and almost exclusively western European), but the medievalist will also find much to whet her interest here. Whether the volume manages to be more than the sum of its constituent parts, however, is rather less clear. Despite the editors' best efforts to highlight points of common interest, the approaches taken and materials examined are often quite disparate; and the lack of a conclusion only seems to reinforce this message. Still, the constituent parts remain fascinating; and scholars working on forgery in any region or period will gain greatly from reading these pages.​