Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship

by Anthony Grafton

Just as it "takes a thief to catch a thief," so the forger greatly aids the search for historical truth, maintains Anthony Grafton in this wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship. Labeling forgery the "criminal sibling" of criticism, he describes a panorama of remarkable individuals--forgers, from classical Greece through the recent past, who produced a variety of splendid triumphs of learning and style, and scholarly detectives, who honed the tools of scholarship in attempts to unmask these skillful fakers. In the process he discloses the extent, the coherence, and the historical interest of two significant and tightly intertwined strands in the Western intellectual tradition. "The desire to forge," writes the author, "can bite and infect almost anyone: . . . the honest as well as the rogue." Forgers are inspired not only by ambition or greed but also by impulses to play jokes, exuberant desires to see the past made whole again, or serious wishes to invoke divine or distantly historical authority for particular spiritual or national traditions. Whatever their goals, forgers in classical antiquity as well as in the modern era have often been well ahead of critics in the pursuit of methods of authenticating documents, and Grafton shows that many techniques normally considered the invention of scholars in early modern Europe were already employed in classical times. This accessible work discusses forgers as different from each other as Dionysus the "Renegade," Erasmus, Carlo Sigonio, James Macpherson ("Ossian"), Thomas Chatterton, and the great sixteenth-century Dominican scholar Giovanni Nanni (Annius) of Viterbo, whose forged histories by Berosus, Manetho, and other ancient authors drove the real histories of the ancient world from the literary marketplace for almost a hundred years. One chapter is devoted to comparing three scholars--Porphyry (third century), Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), and Richard Reitzenstein (1861-1931)--whose efforts to deal with the same body of forged material, the Hermetica, reveal both continuity and change in critical method. What emerges from Forgers and Critics is a new appreciation for a strange literary genre that has flourished for over 2500 years--amusing its uninvolved observers, enraging its humiliated victims, and, most importantly, contributing to a richer sense of what the past was really like.

Genres: History

168 pages, Hardcover

First published March 7, 1990

About the author

Anthony Thomas Grafton is an American historian of early modern Europe and the Henry Putnam University Professor of History at Princeton University, where he is also the Director the Program in European Cultural Studies. He is also a corresponding fellow of the British Academy and a recipient of the Balzan Prize. From January 2011 to January 2012, he served as the President of the American Historical Association. From 2006 to 2020, Grafton was co-executive editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.

Reviews

[Camille · Rating 4 out of 5]

La thèse de Grafton : il n'y a pas une coupure radical entre la critique philologique et la création d'un faux. Cette thèse est défendue avec brio, dans un livre peut être un peu court.

[John David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Anthony Grafton is one of the greatest living scholars of early modern Europe. Several of his books, including his work on figures like Joseph Scaliger, Girolamo Cardano and Leon Battista Alberti, have shed a tremendous amount of light on the cultural world of the Renaissance. While the book purports to be a “wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship,” it provides a narrow look at four examples leaving the reader with no “bigger picture” in sight.

At its heart, this book is about our obsession with authority and “originality,” which sounds like it might be easy to define but gets hard to pin down when the subjects of the discussion are texts with centuries-long histories. Not only does this obsession exist on the part of forgers who are trying to impart some a sense of authenticity where none exists, but also on the “true scholars” who come out of the various schools of textual criticism. Forgery and pseudepigraphy (Grafton distinguishes between the two) not only led scholars astray, but directly contributed to the rise of criticism. In fact, Grafton thinks textual criticism as we know it today wasn’t the result of some independent need for it but instead the result of a slow accretion of practices and methodologies which arose because of fabricators in the first place. “Forger and critics have been entangled through time like Laocoon and his serpents,” he writes.

The basic idea is that both critics and forgers formed a kind of mutualistic relationship, slowly refining both of their crafts after familiarizing themselves with the work of the other. Along the way, Grafton occasionally traces historical motifs like the one of the “found object” Acusilaus of Argos likely first perpetrated when he claimed to have found some bronze tablets in his garden; this lie would eventually become the strategy du jour for forgeries in the nineteenth century as the Romantics found themselves increasingly enchanted with the old, decrepit, and fragmentary. Grafton contends that the very ruse of forgery can only be believed for so long. In trying to get a text to look like it is from a different time and place, the forger inevitably leaves behind tell-tale signs of her handiwork: “Any forger, however deft, imprints the pattern and text of his own period’s life, thought, and language on the past he hopes to make seem real and vivid,” he writes.

Chapter Three looks at the work of three critics – Porphyry, Isaac Casaubon (who very well may have been the inspiration for George Eliot’s character Edward Casaubon), and Richard Reitzenstein – all of whom suffered from vitiated critical powers when they were working with texts that undergirded their own biases and assumptions. One can guess that the pitfall of confirmation bias will always be a bete noire of literary studies.

The seed of this book was originally a small set of lectures Grafton delivered which someone later suggested he expand into book form. While providing the occasional insight, this is very much a book that gives a look at the individual trees but misses the view from the forest canopy. This is a shame. Because of the unfinished, not-quite-effective lecture-into-book aura the book exudes, it ultimately feels, ironically, like a bit of a fabrication itself, perhaps too quickly rushed to press. Hopefully sometime in the future, he’ll be able to revisit it, fill in some of the interstices of his argument, and make the book twice as long. If that book ever comes, I’ll gladly re-read it with relish.

[Lukerik · Rating 4 out of 5]

True crime for book lovers. The opening section is particularly good where he gives an overview of literary forgeries down to the early modern period. Then he gets into various cases in more detail and finally the techniques and people who detected the frauds. It’s not separate case studies, but rather Grafton has a really smooth way of writing whereby he brings in a whole load of factoids along the way. Learned, but not all technical, and very interesting.

[Stefania Zanatta · Rating 1 out of 5]

Il tema sarebbe anche interessante, ma il libro è confuso, spiega un po' a casaccio le cose. Non ha un filo conduttore.

[Beth Friedman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not exactly what I was expecting, but mostly interesting.

[Kate · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read for school. Really interesting and I definitely overall enjoyed this. I feel like the overview chapter did too much and then at the same time the book was too short? Anyways, that’s if I’m being super critical his thesis is very slay

[Stephen Sorensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a great introduction to forgery. This edition was published in 2019 and is an updated version of the original from 1990. It’s mainly authored by Anthony Grafton but the forward is by Ann Blair.