Forgers and Critics, New Edition: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship

by Anthony Grafton

Book Overview

The close links between forgery and criticism throughout history

In Forgers and Critics, Anthony Grafton provides a wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship. Labeling forgery the "criminal sibling" of criticism, Grafton 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, as well...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0691191832
• ISBN13: 9780691191836
• Release Date: April 2019
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.5" x 8.4"

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A short book on the history of forged historical documents, and efforts to detect them, from ancient to modern times.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