What modern scholars call "forgeries" (be they texts, seals, coins, or
relics) flourished in the central Middle Ages. Although lying was
considered wrong throughout the period, such condemnation apparently did
not extend to forgeries. Rewriting documents was especially common among
monks, who exploited their mastery of writing to reshape their
records.
Monastic scribes frequently rewrote their archives, using charters,
letters, and narratives, to create new usable pasts for claiming lands
and privileges in their present or future. Such imagined histories could
also be deployed to "reform" their community or reshape its relationship
with lay and ecclesiastical authorities. Although these creative
rewritings were forgeries, they still can be valuable evidence of
medieval mentalities. While forgeries cannot easily be used to
reconstruct what did happen, forgeries embedded in historical
narratives show what their composers believed should have happened and
thus they offer valuable access to why medieval people rewrote their
pasts.
This book offers close analysis of three monastic archives over the long
eleventh century: Saint Peter's, Ghent; Saint-Denis near Paris; and
Christ Church, Canterbury. These foci provide the basis for
contextualizing key shifts in documentary culture in the twelfth century
across Europe. Overall, the book argues that connections between
monastic forgeries and historical writing in the tenth through twelfth
centuries reveal attempts to reshape reality. Both sought to rewrite the
past and thereby promote monks' interests in their present or future.
