Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship

by Anthony Grafton

Book Overview

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...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691055440
• ISBN13: 9780691055442
• Release Date: March 1990
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 168 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

anecdotal

A short book on the history of forged historical documents, and efforts to detect them, from ancient to modern times. It skips around too much, without giving enough context for most of its anecdotes. Part of its larger message is that both practices are age-old, and that the higher criticism of 19c Germany was not as new as it seemed. Also, forgery was always considered wrong; epistemological concepts haven't changed that much. Another message is that the two are intertwined, and even some of the "gravest" opponents and critics of forgery, such as Erasmus, at times were forgers themselves.