Customer Reviews

Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship

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A short book on the history of forged historical documents, and efforts to detect them, from ancient to modern times.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.