“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive!” So wrote Sir Walter Scott in his historical romance “Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field” (1808, VI.17). Tangled, motley, multifarious, labyrinthine—these and any number of similar adjectives, nearly all pejorative, might describe the preternatural handmaiden of the history of information that is forgery. An allied term of more recent vintage, fake news, connotes untruth and illegitimacy while dismissing, in the same breath, verifiable *facts as imagined political conspiracies. Mendacity trumps reason. Inconvenient verities become tall tales, hard data distortions, and facts mere fantasies, as information is distributed and consumed instantaneously through prefiltered digital and social media. Soon, it seems, any version of the “truth” is possible—past, present, and future—even documentable, from the Flood to the Apocalypse.
But in fact forgery has always been with us, at least since the beginning of written histories and through all recorded time. Indeed, if there is one telltale characteristic (albeit one among many) that often distinguishes forgery from other forms of historical information, it is the obsession of so many forgers to prove that they are indeed quite true. The arts of persuasion often constitute a suppressed premise within any thoughtful imposture. Scratch just below the surface, and a far more existential anxiety reveals itself about perceived legitimacy and ostensible documentary origins. Prior to *Enlightenment rationalism and empirical systems of new knowledge, the prevailing standard for judging the probity and authority of any historical claim was rooted in its antiquity. True genius invariably came into the present day through a tradition of thought relayed across centuries and millennia, from an impossibly remote moment in the distant past when giants still presumably walked on the earth and God still spoke directly to mankind. Much as the phrase “it is written,” forgery thrived on the implication of self-authorization, whose weight coincided, indubitably, with antique origins.
Another red flag of forgery has been its particular talent for filling in glaring lacunae within the historical record, offering newly concocted, but ostensibly ancient, evidence of things that may have been, at best, only semipreposterous. Jesus never set pen down to paper in the Gospels, but we are given from the third century his sole (surely dictated) correspondence with King Abgar of Edessa (attested in Eusebius’s Historia, I.13.6–9). Another apocryphal epistle of the sixth century, Jesus’s “Letter from Heaven,” altered the Sabbath from the Jewish Saturday to the Christian Sunday, while all but assuring its future success, doubling as one of the first “chain letters” in Western history—divinely blessed were those who copied and circulated it, and damned were those who did not. The Gospels are also frustratingly silent about the precise visage of Jesus, and so there appeared by about the eleventh century an apocryphal eyewitness description of the color and disposition of Jesus’s hair, skin, and eyes by “Publius Lentulus,” a fictitious “Governor of Judea,” recorded in a letter to the Senate of Rome. Tens of thousands of paintings of Jesus Christ are indebted, either directly or indirectly, to this short text, which is notably preserved in scores of medieval manuscripts. Similarly, the contemporaneous lives of arguably the two most famous letter writers of ancient Rome, Seneca the Younger (also much admired by medieval thinkers as a proto-Christian moral philosopher) and St. Paul eventually precipitated a lively imagined epistolary exchange between the two. Its most prominent invalidation in print had to wait until the appearance of Desiderius Erasmus’s second edition of Seneca’s Opera in 1529.
The scribal culture of the Middle Ages greatly circumscribed access to comparative textual evidence regarding apocryphal, misattributed, or otherwise forged texts. There were few great libraries to speak of, and those that did exist were far-flung. *Literacy was something of a monopoly carefully protected by the Roman Catholic ecclesiastical elite. Correspondingly, as the prolific medievalist T. F. Tout observed, if homicide was the crime of choice among ambitious knights, then forgery was the preferred transgressive mode for medieval clerics. Prelates could lean heavily on their cultural capital and social prestige as they backdated false charters written on official-looking *parchment membranes signed and sealed, claiming long-established land tenures and grants of privileges that were never so. An effective apparatus of diplomatics enabling the detection of such documentary fakes seemed almost suddenly to appear only with the Benedictine paleographer Jean Mabillon’s De re diplomatica (On the study of documents, 1681).
Most premodern forgeries of scholarly interest today were less concerned with pecuniary interests than with heralding the triumph of Christianity in the West, and the prestige of the Roman Catholic Church most of all. The most well-known of these was the so-called Donatio Constantini (Donation of Constantine), an apocryphal gift bestowed on Pope Sylvester I by the Emperor Constantine granting all the lands of Italy and Europe upon Constantine’s departure to his new eponymous capital in the Byzantine East. The omnicapable quattrocento humanist Lorenzo Valla undertook a withering forensic levelling of the Donatio on *philological as well as rhetorical grounds, proving impossible linguistic anachronisms and its many risible breaks from the decorum of the ancient imperial Latin language. Many subsequent demolition experts in the history of forgery were profoundly indebted to Valla, though apologists, such as the prefect of the Vatican Library Agostino Steuco, soldiered on over the subsequent century devising more elaborate critical props for the Donatio in order to support latter-day papal claims and ambitions. Just as opportunistically, others, including the early religious reformers Martin Luther and the indefatigable Ulrich von Hutten, went on to resuscitate the long-dead horse of the Donatio only to sacrifice it once more on the altar of Protestant antipapalism.
The novel technology of print may have facilitated as many forgeries as it did critiques of them. Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century fabulist Historia regum Britanniae (History of the kings of Britain) is a case in point. Based partly on a “very ancient book” he professed to consult in the Welsh language (to which no one else apparently had access), Geoffrey’s text, and its considerable medieval influence, inspired robust debates that lasted at least a century between humanist critics like Polydore Virgil and John Selden, and inveterate English antiquaries such as John Leland and John Price who were keener to valorize Geoffrey’s romantic accounts of King Arthur’s Camelot than to see them go. Other medieval authors experienced similarly mixed receptions in the era of print; the political philosopher John of Salisbury’s hugely influential twelfth-century Policraticus borrowed considerably from a false work of Plutarch but also preserved entirely legitimate textual witnesses of the otherwise lost ancient Roman Satyricon by Petronius. The authenticity of the Satyricon was, in turn, ferociously contested throughout the second half of the seventeenth century, following the discovery of the substantial “Trau Fragment” containing over fifty missing chapters. These were dismissed as modern forgeries that betrayed the French or Italian native tongue of their latter-day author before Nicolaas Heinsius revealed in 1676 on philological grounds that they were genuine and that their solecisms were deliberate: Petronius’s way of characterizing the semiliterate character Trimalchio.
After more than a century in print, several lingering classical Judeo-Christian impostures were not finally razed to the ground until the later seventeenth century. Prominent among these was pseudo-Aristeas’s “Letter of Philocrates” ostensibly relaying the precise circumstances surrounding the biblical translation of the Greek Septuagint from the original Hebrew, and Richard Bentley’s masterful annihilation of the impossibly ancient sixth-century BCE Greek “Letters of Phalaris” in 1699. In proving on philological grounds that the Phalaris text dated only from the second century CE, Bentley weakened an essential plank of the argument favoring the most ancient literary authorities over modern authors in what Jonathan Swift famously entitled the “Battle of the Books.” So, too, had fallen the ancient Egyptian mystique of Hermes Trismegistus, who was for many centuries thought to have been a contemporary of Moses himself. The optimistically syncretic Corpus Hermeticum was shown by the great hammer of forgers, Isaac Casaubon, in 1614 not to have been translated from an impossibly early Egyptian, but once again to have been written in late antique Greek.
Not all forgeries were concerned solely with sorting authentic pagan and early Christian literature from lore. More ambitious impostures methodologically cut huge swatches of human history from whole cloth in the service of their inventors’ personal fame, and the promise of patronage from the great and the good. Primus inter pares among these was surely Annius of Viterbo, who came to the attention of Pope Alexander VI, particularly after staging a 1493 excavation in his hometown (also, conveniently, a papal summer retreat) in which he unearthed, inter alia, a false stone “hieroglyph” offering primordial evidence of the presence there of Isis and Osiris. Annius’s “mastery” of ancient Etruscan, and his transcription and edition of eleven “lost” treatises by ancient Egyptian, Chaldean, Persian, Jewish, Greek, and Roman authors revealed Viterbo to be the chosen capital of Noah’s postdiluvian global empire. Obtaining the mysterious works of “Berosus Chaldaeus” and “Manetho of Egypt” from an Armenian monk in Genoa, and others from the imagined medieval miscellany of “William of Mantua,” Annius wrote learned commentaries on them all—or, rather, wrote the works themselves (all in Latin “translation”) based on what he had then intended to be their commentaries. His was a tangled web indeed. Dozens of editions of Annius’s impostures were printed, with and without his commentaries, into the seventeenth century. Sidestepping the prestigious ancient Greeks as mendacious newcomers, Annius favored the presumably ultra-ancient Etruscans, and Noah himself, to fashion for Viterbo the ultimate historical pedigree after the Flood.
A host of other syncretistic and patriotic mythographers paid Annius the highest compliment of imitation, circumventing altogether any Greco-Roman traditions of authoritative descent to which their native lands were, in the extant classical literature, either barbaric or irrelevant. In their place, they elevated their own more ancient ancestors chosen, as they wished, whether from the sons of Noah, the Trojans, or the Etruscans or Celts, et alia. Annian “reforgeries” appeared across Europe, including texts of the sixteenth-century French authors Jean Lemaire de Belges and Guillaume Postel, and the Noachian and early Saxon contrivances of the Elizabethan Catholic exiles Richard White of Basingstoke and Richard Verstegan. This Annian enterprise persisted despite a long and formidable line of proficient critics, including Pietro Crinito, Beatus Rhenanus, Melchor Cano, and Gaspar Barreiros.
The allied archaeological and textual foundations of Annius’s seminal inventions are admirably reflected in ever-expanding syllogae (collections) of lapidary inscriptions transcribed and, very often, illustrated in engraved printed “facsimiles.” Authentic inscriptional facts were invariably mixed and buried together with creative epigraphic fictions in any number of humongous compendia, notably those of Petrus Apianus and Bartholomaeus Amantius (1534), and Jan Gruter and Joseph Scaliger (1603). Of course, the vast majority of these were nigh impossible “to check” physically against the originals (where there were originals), scattered across the great cities, country palaces, and private collections of Europe.
The precocious Volterran Curzio Inghirami took all this a step further, planting “scariths” (i.e., time capsules fashioned from bitumen, wax, and other preservative materials) containing ancient Etruscan manuscripts (à la Annius) around his aristocratic estate, which were then duly discovered with friends on digs. The result was a magnificently illustrated 1637 folio of still more scribal “facsimiles” of these manuscripts written by the pagan Etruscan priest-prophet Prospero of Fiesole, including his scribal auguries of the coming of Jesus Christ. Attracting immediate and scathing criticisms in print, the irrepressible phenom Inghirami went on to publish a monumental one-thousand-page defense of his own forgery (albeit, printed in a large-type quarto format). Literary forgery had, by the seventeenth century, reached quasi-epic proportions.
The eighteenth century inspired perhaps the widest modern scholarly literature of the whole “House of forgery,” as Horace Walpole termed it. Following on the imaginative ancient travel fables of Euhemerus and Ctesias, and the ubiquity of the late medieval Sir John Mandeville, unprecedented long-distance trade and European imperial conquests stimulated latter-day imposters to do much the same, only in far more sensational and elaborate detail. The French refugee to England George Psalmanazar posed for years as an exotic “Formosan” (i.e., Taiwanese), whose account of the Formosan language and alphabet may constitute the earliest “constructed language” (much as latter-day Klingon and Esperanto) in print, beginning with his History of Formosa (1704). Bristol’s Mary Baker in 1817 perpetuated this unique sort of hoax, impersonating “Princess Caraboo,” who had apparently been kidnapped by pirates and was capable only of speaking her native, impenetrable “Far Eastern” language.
These “travel liar” concoctions inspired several of the earliest English novels but also stood in counterpoint to contemporary efforts to bound, if not across oceans, then across centuries of history to “discover” great *vernacular British verse where it had never been. James Macpherson’s Fingal—more commonly known by the name of its imagined third-century blind bard of Argyllshire, Ossian—was in truth a neo-Gaelic pastiche drawn from a host of latter-day sources. Almost universal admiration was showered on this newly recovered Scots Homer, regardless, perhaps most hyperbolically by Emperor Napoleon and the American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson not only excerpted from the Ossian forgeries in his *commonplace books but, in one letter to Macpherson’s brother, proclaimed that “I think this rude bard of the North the greatest Poet that has ever existed.” Inspired imitation poured forth from the pens of Coleridge, Byron, Blake, and many others, inspiring the broader question, even after his exposure in the later eighteenth century, “Was Macpherson really a forger?” Or was he, who had remained fairly reticent about his efforts, simply a creative author of imaginative literature?
Less ambiguous were the material English literary forgeries of the teenaged medieval fantasist Thomas Chatterton, who fabricated on old and artificially aged *parchment eccentrically spelled and paleographically crabbed fragments of an invented fifteenth-century English vernacular poet-priest Thomas Rowley. Chatterton’s no-holds-barred struggle for literary prestige and patronage was quickly quashed after he failed to lure Horace Walpole into his imaginary web. Chatterton died young in a London garret from a drug overdose only to be lionized by the later Romantic poets as an archetypal artist crying out into the wilderness. The much longer lived forger and poetaster William Henry Ireland was even more impressive for the boldness of his bardolotry. He “discovered” numerous manuscripts in the very hand of William Shakespeare, which usefully filled in glaring gaps in the patchy historical record surrounding Shakespeare’s life and literary career. Numerous manuscript copies of Shakespeare’s “Confession of Faith,” a love letter to Anne Hathaway enclosed with a lock of his hair, signed and annotated books from the playwright’s library, and even Shakespeare’s “lost” play Vortigern count as high points in the surviving corpus of Ireland’s superproductive, quasi-literary imagination.
The nineteenth century introduced a “golden age” of forgery undertaken increasingly for pecuniary purposes focused on the scions of a new aristocratic “bibliomania.” These largely aristocratic collectors were encouraged to spend unprecedented sums, both by one another in an acquisitive sort of competition, and by the diasporic sale of the great French libraries just after 1789. George de Gibler (aka “Major Byron”) specialized in a particular vogue for the almighty literary autograph, leaving behind scores of manuscript “letters” and books bearing the Romantic effusions of Lord Byron. Bolder still was the Frenchman Vrain-Denis Lucas, whose stock of manuscripts for sale included implausible “transcripts” of the epistles of Aristotle and his student Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar and Cleopatra, Mary Magdalene, Judas Iscariot, Joan of Arc, Dante, Montaigne, and the list goes on—some twenty-seven thousand in all, for which Lucas spent two years in prison. “Ancient” Greek manuscripts on aggressively aged parchment were sold by the forger Constantine Simonides to the great collector Sir Thomas Phillipps, including textual fragments of Homer and Hesiod that Phillipps even printed on his private press at Middle Hill in 1855.
As with manuscript, so with print, impossibly rare pamphlets and limited private press productions of works by contemporary *canonical authors attracted collectors. Thomas Wise and Harry Forman did not so much corrupt the literary corpora of Tennyson and the Rossettis as capitalize on their popularity through the antiquarian book trade. The gullibility of such collectors was perhaps nowhere more delightfully satirized than in the hoax of Renier Hubert Ghislain de Chalon, who issued in 1840 a famous provincial auction-sale catalog in the tiny Belgian village of Binche, comprising an imaginary collection of “unique” imprints from the private library of the legendary Comte de Fortsas. Copies of this ultimate bibliomaniacal forgery are, true to its very nature, scarce in the trade even today and irresistible to in-the-know antiquarian collectors.
Recent jaundiced “fake news” epithets in digital media also had their (very real) counterparts in mass print production. David Croly’s and George Wakeman’s storied 1864 Miscegenation pamphlet (which apparently coined the term) pretended a radical Republican program to promote racial intermarriage in order to drive mainstream support from the antislavery party of Abraham Lincoln. Such bare-knuckled racism proved a potent power a half century later with the appearance of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion “documenting” a global Jewish conspiracy to usurp control over all human civilization. Adolf Hitler and the American industrialist Henry Ford helped assure a vast readership for this anti-Semitic venom throughout the second quarter of the twentieth century. Political hoaxes proved to be equal opportunity employers in the right hands, as with the Baltimore-born African American Joseph Howard Lee. Lee reinvented himself, in defiance of the Jim Crow South, with his fake autobiography as the African prince Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola, which he subtitled “An African Savage’s Own Story” (Knopf, 1930). Also claiming to be a “Black Jew” directly descended from the diaspora following the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, Lee signed copies and responded to fan mail, in an affected pidgin English encapsulated in his personal motto: “struggle begats strength.”
The Regius Professor of History at Oxford Hugh Trevor-Roper was not immune to the attractions of documentary fakes. Though he reversed his former authentication of the so-called Hitler Diaries, he was later taken in by the “Secret Gospel of Mark,” which had implied a homosexual affair between the historical Jesus and an acolyte. That sexual politics “gospel hoax” was echoed more recently in the 2012 sensation launched by Harvard’s Hollis Professor of Divinity regarding the so-called Gospel of Jesus’s Wife—a Coptic *papyrus fragment suggesting Jesus had been married. In this more recent tangle in the great web of forgery, recent scholarship has dismissed this gospel truth as yet another fake.
Earle Havens
See also books; diplomats/spies; documentary authority; error; plagiarizing; professors; readers; travel