Complex Pseudonymity: Annius of Viterbo's Multiple Persona Disorder

Annius of Viterbo (Giovanni Nanni, 1432-1502) was the most innovative literary forger of all time. In the collection of forged texts that he published in 1498, he not only rewrote the entire history of the world, but did so through the most elaborate complex of authorial pseudo-identities the world had seen. His masterpiece (for such it was) contained eleven pseudo-antique chronicles, each attributed to a different ancient author, and featured a number of secondary presences. All these many personae were masks of a single creator. In many ways, the mechanics of his hoax are still unsurpassed. A closer look at the ways in which pseudonymity and anonymity are conventionally used to describe textual artifacts will prepare us to clarify the complex strategies by means of which the forger hoped to elude exposure.

We refer to a "nom de plume" when a pseudonym is essentially transparent; the proper (etymologically the "own"), historical, or "empirical" identity of a writer is assumed either to be known to readers in general, or to be easily discovered by more than a few of them.¹ A true pseudonym implies the difficulty or impossibility of establishing proper identity, and can take one of three forms. The first, and least personalized, is anonymity: it is the degree zero of Foucault's "author-function," that is, a way of referring to texts by characterizing and anthropomorphizing their distinctive features.² We refer to that nameless person who transcribed the text in the form we now read as "the Beowulf-poet." Since very little biographical contextualization can even be conjectured, anonymity is essentially a pseudonym—actually a metonymy—for the text itself. If we subsequently discover another text showing very similar traits, then the term "Beowulf-poet" becomes synonymous with a style, in the same way in which art historians refer to "the Master of Flemalle" or "the Master of the House-Book." As a pseudo-proper noun, "Anonymous" is encountered mainly as a bibliographic placeholder in older scholarship to designate the implied authors or redactors of less celebrated texts or of fragments; nowadays any unattributable text will be alphabetically designated by its title, rather than by recourse to "Anonymous."³

The second stage of pseudonymity involves the creation of an authorial persona via the attribution of a pseudo-proper name: François Rabelais attributes his early works to the anagrammatic "Alcofrybas Nasier," who appears in the texts as both narrator and actant within the diegesis. It is often difficult to determine the difference between a second-stage pseudonym and a simple nom de plume; but I will define the discriminator as the degree of attention paid to creating and cultivating a distinct authorial persona behind the pseudonym. "Alcofrybas Nasier" is a distinctly less reliable narrator and author-persona than "Françoys Rabelais, Docteur en Médecine," his successor from the Third Book onward, who more nearly resembles what is known about the empirical author Rabelais.⁴

A third-stage pseudonym entails the transfer of authorship to a historical personage, one whose name is usually known to the intended audience. In many cases, a third-stage pseudonym is the marker of texts reviled as forgeries. Curzio Inghirami, the early seventeenth-century teenage forger, attributed his pseudo-antique texts to an imaginary Etruscan priest named Prospero.⁵ In this, he was adapting a template famously described by the ancient authors Pliny the Elder, Livy, and Plutarch, who recounted the fraudulent discovery of books attributed to Numa Pompilius, a historical personage (fl. ca. 700 BCE) who was the second king of Rome and the legendary founder of its Etruscan-derived religion.⁶ In extreme cases, the attribution of authorship might be functional to libel, or even satire, if the assumed name should belong to a living contemporary.

Obviously, the attribution must be made by someone. This someone, this attributor, can be referred to as the sponsor.⁷ The sponsor is the mirror-reversed image of the third-stage pseudonym. As we shall see below, it (or "he") denies authorial responsibility by transferring it elsewhere, and assuming the pose of textual...