Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe ed. by Stephens, Walter and Earle A. Havens (review)

When thinking of the term "forgery," most people's minds turn to counterfeit documents—or works of art—that have been fashioned in an attempt to falsify their origins. While this traditional definition of forgery has a place in Literary Forgery in Early Modern Europe, 1450–1800, this collection of thirteen different essays complicates the idea of forgery. This book's essays show that forgery can not only be the act of making a document seem older than it really is, but that the idea of forgery can also encompass stories that were invented to promote certain ideas or fashion a history. Literary Forgery also highlights the imaginative and innovative aspects behind forgers' falsified ideas and stories and shows the impact that popular forgeries had on scholarship. Throughout the book, Literary Forgery emphasizes that forgeries are a literary genre that deserves to be studied in its own right.

The first essay of Literary Forgery is written by Arthur Freemen, an avid collector of literary forgeries who bequeathed his collection to the Johns Hopkins University library; this collection, now known as the Bibliotheca Fictiva, serves as the inspiration for the essays contained in Literary Forgery. Freeman provides his reflections on the various terms associated with forgery. In addition, he grapples with where forgery begins and another genre—such as pure fiction or hoaxes—ends. The second essay of the collection is written by one of the book's editors, Earle Havens. This essay too provides the reader with intriguing reflections on the nebulous genre that is literary forgery, as well as a small overview of some of the forged works contained in the Bibliotheca Fictiva collection.

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The third essay of the collection, written by Frederic Clark, deals with the peculiar case of the Cosmographia. The Cosmographia was originally written in the Middle Ages by Aethicus Ister, but was published in print for the first time in 1575. Clark unwinds the long and complicated history of this text, its authorship, and the misattributions made in the Renaissance regarding this book. Clark deems the Cosmographia a case of "secondary pseudonymity—that is, a conflation or confusion between author and text indirectly occasioned by a primary or original act or forgery or falsification" because the print edition of the Cosmographia was falsely attributed to Ister, and thus further confusion regarding the work ensued (77).

The subsequent contribution deals with Guido delle Colonne's late thirteenth-century forged Historia destructionis Troiae. The author of the essay, E.R. Truitt, delves into the possible motivations of the forger. Truitt claims that Guido's odd additions to his history of Troy were an effort "to establish his own credibility as a historiographer," as well as to distance himself from another popular history of the Trojan Wars that was produced in the mid-twelfth century, Benoît de Sainte-Maure's Roman de Troie (101).

Next, James K. Coleman explores the case of a forgery that was not, in fact, written with the intent to deceive its audience, Laudivio Zacchia's fictitious correspondences of Sultan Mehmed II. Coleman contends that Zacchia's letters would have been clearly recognized "as a playful fiction and an elegant rhetorical exercise"—that is, an imitation of classical writing—by erudite readers. Less learned readers, however, mistook the letters as a true correspondence; thus, Zacchia's work was misconstrued as a forgery.

The next four essays of Literary Forgery deal with one of the most (in)famous and popular forgers of the fifteenth century, Annius of Viterbo. Shana D. O'Connell writes about Annius' Antiquities, a creative forgery that effectively turned an Etruscan god into the biblical figure of Noah, and then continued on to claim that Noah himself had founded Annius' hometown of Viterbo, Italy. O'Connell exposes how Annius used both legitimate and forged sources to produce this tale. Anthony Grafton turns his attention to Annius' claim to know both...