• Earle Havens
  (co-editor)
• Johns Hopkins University Press
  ,
  2019
• Purchase Online

This comprehensive study of literary and historiographical forgery goes well beyond questions of authorship. It spotlights the imaginative vitality of forgery and its sinister impact on genuine scholarship. This volume demonstrates that early modern forgery was a literary tradition in its own right, with distinctive connections to politics, Greek and Roman classics, religion, philosophy, and modern literature.

The early modern explosion in forgery of all kinds—particularly in the fields of literary and archaeological falsification—demonstrates a dramatic shift in attitudes toward historical evidence and in the relation of texts to contemporary society. The authors capture the impact of this evolution within many cultural transformations, including the rise of print, changing tastes and fortunes of the literary marketplace, and the Protestant and Catholic Reformations.