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.
