[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
Forgery Beyond Deceit is an excellent volume, immediately securing a place as required reading for anyone interested in fakes and forgeries across disciplines and chronological boundaries. At its heart is an insistence that forgeries are valuable objects which are worthy of study in and of themselves; no longer should the forgery be consigned to Philology’s growing pile of discarded works, deemed inauthentic and therefore worthless. In this way the volume represents a fundamental shift in authenticity studies of the late-twentieth and twenty-first century, and holding this belief as the book’s core allows contributors to explore avenues beyond deceit, as the title has it. The themes of fabrication, value, and desire from the subtitle are woven through each chapter with remarkable consistency, alongside themes such as terminology and typologies, the roles of the forger and the critic, and the reception history of forgeries, all of which recur in forgeries across history. While these are not new concepts in the field, the chapters handle them with such dexterity, and there are such fresh points of contact amongst them, that this volume is an exciting contribution to a field which has been busy in recent years.
Those links across chapters notwithstanding, a core strength of this collection is in the diversity of its contributions. The topics of these chapters may be categorised in two broad groups: forgeries found in writing and forgeries of objects. Forgeries found in writing range from Atticism, through medieval forgeries of classical authorities, to fictional fakes in twentieth-century literature; the latter group demonstrates that just about any object could be forged so long as it was deemed valuable, including statues, relics, books, and coins. Each chapter makes careful distinctions about the type of forgery under discussion: so Howley in chapter 2 distinguishes between the literary forgery, as in the pseudo-Ovids and pseudo-Virgils discussed by Peirano Garrison and Burek, and book forgery, a forgery of the material form of a book, in this case by backdating editions of real works. And in chapter 9 Di Manno makes the important distinction that in the case of forged relics, “it was not necessarily the object that was forged but rather the certainty… that bones belonged without a fragment of a doubt to a specific holy person” (p. 252).
Unusually for an edited volume on forgeries, there are no clear divisions in the volume according to the medium or language of the forgery. Indeed there are no divisions between chapters at all. The collection progresses broadly chronologically, and we move from forgeries created in antiquity to forgeries of antiquity, the dual focus of the book. That shift occurs around Clark’s chapter 7, which begins with a preamble on the importance of forgeries of antiquity, both in understanding antiquity and the contexts which produced the forgeries (“antiquity’s afterlife is just as worthy an object of analysis as antiquity itself,” p. 205). This lack of imposed structure is to the book’s benefit. Readers are less likely to head straight to whichever section interests them (the Renaissance or Greek literature, for instance). Forgery is moreover highly variegated, and periodisation boundaries between antiquity, late antiquity, the Middle Ages, and beyond are notoriously slippery. Rather than enforce unhelpful boundaries, then, the volume leans into this diversity, avoiding the structural rigidities which can afflict edited collections.
In the Introduction Hopkins and McGill assert that forgeries are complex cultural artefacts: in the traditional sense they exist outside of and on the margins of culture, and yet simultaneously they are culture, crafting cultural norms and boundaries, and setting the course of cultural history upon their exposure (the Donation of Constantine is perhaps the primary example of this). Forgeries generate and reflect desires, and so the book explores a “sought-after antiquity” (p. 2). The value of forgeries is the essence of the volume (they are “valuable tools to think with,” and “meaningful products of reception and desire,” p. 2). The chapters do well in underscoring this argument, as in Hallett’s chapter 1, where the Corinthian bronze was fitting for temples “because of its aesthetic impact: its brilliance, its quality” (p. 89, author’s emphasis), from Pliny’s viewpoint – in other words, forgery is understood as a work of art. Lapatin’s Prologue immediately gets to work exploring an array of theories and contexts associated with forgeries, and of all the chapters this will be of greatest interest to the non-specialist. Lapatin guides us through different kinds of forgeries, their varying motivations, attendant circumstances, and what might be learnt from them. He highlights some tropes of the genre, including authenticatory devices, the role of the market, and the “erudition effect” (p. 18), where the scholarship which grows around the forgery adds new layers of authentication. Lapatin concludes by characterising the forger as the hero of the story, a cult figure who has bested the experts and lingers in the imagination far more than the detective who unmasks them. The appearance of Joseph Hone’s The Book Forger [Penguin, 2024] after this volume’s publication demonstrates that compelling stories can be forged from the perspective of those detectives, and the light shone on the forger here could have illuminated “cult heroes” on the other side of the forger-critic divide (Erasmus or Mabillon, for instance). Nonetheless, Lapatin’s intellectual sprightliness in making connections between, for example, the DeBry marble head and an agate intaglio as potential accidental forgeries (pp. 31–32) makes this chapter one of the most enjoyable reads of the collection.
Questions of terminologies and typologies run through the volume. Forgery and its related terms, subsections, and antonyms are notoriously difficult to define, whether one approaches the challenge via their historical-literary-cultural contexts or by attempting to define one term by way of another. In a collection like that under review, this means encountering and attempting to digest an array of approaches. Forgeries can be accidental, partial, beneficial, or rehabilitated; they are similar to, but not the same as, copies, reproductions, duplicates, facsimiles, imitations, emulations, and counterfeits; there are primary and secondary forgeries, forgeries after the fact, and fictional forgeries (alternatively pseudo-forgeries). In chapter 4 Peirano Garrison even distinguishes between pseudepigrapha and pseudepigraphy (p. 150). Taken as a whole, this can be bewildering, and yet it reflects an inherent inability to taxonomise forgeries comprehensively in one system, as has long been acknowledged.[1]
It may come as no surprise that a book on forgeries should invoke Anthony Grafton’s influential dynamic of the forger and the critic, and this volume is no exception.[2] In his exploration of Dares as the first “pagan historian” (p. 204) in his ‘eyewitness’ account of the Trojan War, Clark (chapter 7) implicates the critics as much as the forgers. Just like forgery, criticism “has long been a byproduct of longing, the fruit of a desire to reconstitute an idealized antiquity” (p. 206), and when tracing the surprisingly slow debunking of Dares’ work from 1400 onwards, Clark highlight critics like Gaspar Scioppius, who, like a forger, “had to invent an idealized antiquity with which to perform the task of criticism” (p. 217). It fits wonderfully with the volume as a whole, and the focus on the forger and the critic is maintained in the next chapter by Burek, which is concerned with De vetula, a complex medieval forgery of Ovid. Burek characterises a central motivation of the forger as: “what might a forger say to his critics, when given the chance?” (p. 227). Blurring the forger/critic boundary to excellent effect is chapter 3 (Kim), which explores how the skills of the forger and the critic might overlap. Kim argues that Atticism shares ideology and practices with Echtheitskritik, which looks for anachronisms in texts. This fine chapter concludes with a relevant quandary for the volume, that is that a postclassical author could produce an authentically classical text, and that “through assiduous study authenticity can be achieved” (p. 144). This chapter also draws out a latent theme in the collection, namely the centrality of schooling practices (especially imitatio) to forgery in and of the ancient world.
This book goes beyond the binary of the forger and the critic to examine and interrogate other related groups: the antiquarians, the collectors, the middlemen, the enslaved and freed labourers, and the reader and the audience, all of whom have some stake in the forgery at hand. How complicit are these groups in producing and perpetuating forgeries? In chapter 5, Higbie asks whether ordinary citizens knew when coins were not genuine. If they did, would they have passed them on regardless, thus keeping fake coins in circulation and keeping the forgery alive? What about, as in Kansteiner’s chapter 10, the “willingly deceived clients” (p. 306) of bronzes which had been added to and augmented? Elsewhere Howley, in chapter 2, considers the type of labour needed to make books in the Roman world, contrasting the elite culture of Roman collectors who desired the appearance of age (and, therefore, drove demand for forging) with the banausic labour undertaken by “specially trained enslaved or freedman workers” (p. 109). While this line of thought is speculative, it is convincing. Similarly, in chapter 9 Di Manno discusses antiquarians who wanted to believe in the forgery to such an extent that they became complicit, echoing that “elite aesthetic connoisseurship” (p. 94) posited in chapter 2 or the collectors of bronzes in Hallett’s chapter 1.
Finally, Forgery Beyond Deceit embeds its forgeries in their reception history, emphasising the changes in audiences and in scholarship which have altered our understanding of the “original forgery” (a phrase which recalls Lapatin’s contradictory terms from the Prologue, “authentic reproduction,” “genuine copy,” “genuine fake,” or “real phony,” pp. 14–16). There are “forgeries after the fact” (p. 306), as Kansteiner describes them, works which did not intend to deceive, but whose reception history transformed them into deceitful forgeries (specifically, the effects of “the passage of time and loss of information,” p. 274, again by Kansteiner). A surprising number of forgeries fit into this category. The Historia Augusta, the topic of Langenfeld’s chapter 6, is a fascinating example of a text’s shifting reception history. It was not, Langenfeld says, originally intended to deceive, but the loss of context saw it branded a forgery, and it is only in the last century that it has been somewhat rehabilitated and restored to what we currently believe was its original context: it was “crafted to entertain a select group of sophisticated readers, who would have found humor in deciphering the author’s allusions to Roman literary works and contemporary events” (p. 182). Play and humour are a recurring feature here. Clark’s chapter 7 reminds us how quickly the ludic context of forgery is lost using an incisive comparison with the modern satirical website The Onion, which works by misaligning form and content. In the case of Dares’ history “we too lack the precise contextual clues to ‘get it,’ if indeed there is something ludic to be gotten” (p. 211). The markers by which we measure and interpret forgery are also changing: Bartman in chapter 11 concludes that “once viewed as false, restorations are now regarded as signs of the authentic” (p. 333).
Across this collection there are many points of connection, nuanced arguments, and fascinating details. Desire appears in almost every chapter, as generative, intensifying, or destructive. And while the Epilogue reiterates many of the themes discussed here, Collins draws an especially salient point from the contributions: forgery is in so many of these chapters linked to vitality. “Ancient Rome, real and forged, is very much alive” (p. 387). Like the forgeries which it explores, this volume demonstrates that the field of forgery studies is thriving.
Authors and Titles
Introduction. John North Hopkins and Scott McGill
Prologue. Kenneth Lapatin – Ideas of Forgery
- Christopher H. Hallett – “Corinthian Bronzes”: Miniature Masterpieces – Flagrant Forgeries
- Joseph A. Howley – Reading Against the Grain: Book Forgery and Book Labor at Rome
- Lawrence Kim – Imperial Greek Atticism: A Culture of Forgery? Phrynichus and the Terminology of “Authenticity”
- Irene Peirano Garrison – Forgery, Pseudepigrapha, and Other Typologies of Continuation in Latin Literature
- Carolyn Higbie – The Fluidity of False Coins
- Kathryn A. Langenfeld – Ancient Texts and Sibylline Truths: A Reflection on Forged Documentary Evidence and its Value in the Historia Augusta
- Frederic Clark – Thinking with Antiquity’s Ancient Beginnings: The “First Pagan Historian” from Isidore of Seville to Thomas Jefferson
- Jacqueline M. Burek – Forgery and the Desire for the Classical Author in the Pseudo- Ovidian De vetula
- Talia Di Manno – Archaeology and the Invention of Holy Bodies in Post-Tridentine Rome
- Sascha Kansteiner – Deceptively Authentic Additions
- Elizabeth Bartman – Is Restoration Forgery?
- Sean Alexander Gurd – Fictional Forgeries and the Twilight of the Self: The Tablets of Armand Schwerner and Pascal Quignard
Epilogue. Jeffrey Collins – Beyond Deceit and Beyond: Situating Scholarship on Forgery
Notes
[1] As noted, for example, by K. K. Ruthven, Faking Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 34–62.
[2] As cemented in scholarship by Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).