In “The History of Fake News From the Flood to the Apocalypse,” the course Earle Havens teaches at Johns Hopkins University, he presents undergrads with a formidable challenge. They have to create historical forgeries and then defend the authenticity of their deceptions.
Forgeries, hoaxes, and other types of literary fakery have preoccupied Havens, a rare books and manuscripts curator at the university’s Stern Center for the History of the Book, for many years now. As part of his curatorial brief, Havens oversees the Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery, available via JSTOR. It includes more than 2,000 items—rare books, manuscripts, and ephemera—and was the brainchild of Arthur and Janet Freeman, who amassed most of its holdings over a period of some fifty years. Johns Hopkins acquired the majority of the collection from the Freemans in 2011; it has continued to expand in the years since.
Havens spoke with JSTOR Daily about what he finds so thoroughly bewitching about the grand, long tradition of literary forgery.
JSTOR Daily: What is the Bibliotheca Fictiva collection?
Earle Havens: It’s a rare book collection that chronicles the history of literary forgery, including historical as well as imaginative literature, beginning with Old Testament pseudepigrapha and apocrypha all the way up to the middle of the twentieth century. We’ve likely been lying to each other ever since we learned how to speak. It includes physical forgeries, like medieval charters that were forged in the Middle Ages. We also have a “medieval” charter actually forged in the nineteenth century. We also have hundreds of texts that help to reveal and demolish forgeries across the millennia—documenting many of the people who wrote against things that they thought were not correct.
We have faked historical bindings, fake manuscripts, and fake letters by famous people like the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther. We have books about impostors from the Middle Ages to the modern era as well as hoaxes and archaeological forgeries. We don’t do art forgery—that’s another world—but we do have a couple of painted bindings that are forged. We have a few examples of the otherwise mysterious “Spanish forger,” who was probably actually French and active around 1900, forging medieval illuminations on actual medieval vellum and wood panels.
Ours is the biggest collection in the world by a country mile on this subject, and it’s brilliant because it gets at the heart of what we do in the university every day: Get people to ask hard questions about everything and not to trust anything on its face.
When I first taught my graduate seminar on this, one of my students said, “Oh no, I can’t trust anything I read anymore,” and I replied, “Mission accomplished!”
This collection owes its existence to Arthur and Janet Freeman. What can you tell us about them?
Arthur was originally a scholar of the Elizabethan drama—a professor at Boston University for a number of years before moving to London and working for Quaritch, one of the oldest bookseller firms in the world focusing on antiquarian books. He started collecting for himself—starting with a Shakespeare forgery—and then just kept going until his death earlier this year.
The collection’s page on the Johns Hopkins website states that the Freemans set limits on what they would include, but their parameters seem so vast as to be meaningless.
Forgery is a really complicated, even internecine, phenomenon. The ancient Romans and Greeks never really wrote treatises about how to lie well. There are no canons of forgery in Quintilian’s Institutes or Cicero. It was considered immoral to lie and the whole point of writing things down back then was to increase morality and improve society, so there really is no didactic history of forgery. But over time, if you study it as I do—from ancient Aztec aliens invented in the 1960s, to historical anachronisms, fake genealogies—it’s sort of everywhere and kind of endless.
There was a debate about whether Robinson Crusoe should be in the collection because on the title page it says, “written by himself.” But it wasn’t written by Robinson Crusoe—it’s a literary imposture. It belongs in the Bibliotheca Fictiva because it was an imposture by its own author, Daniel Defoe.
What about travel stories where somebody makes a satire of a society like Gulliver’s Travels? Well, Gulliver’s Travels is pure fiction; it doesn’t have to say that it’s real. But Baron Munchausen is in the collection because he was loosely based on a real person, and his ridiculous adventures were presented as if they were autobiographical rather than the fiction of Rudolph Erich Raspe. This handful of examples barely scratch the surface, however, but perhaps they are helpful.
How do you introduce students to this topic?
People think that this fake news phenomenon is a sui generis invention of the digital age. It’s not, and many of the tropes and forms and ways in which people attempt to deceive one another or misinform were the same in the premodern and early modern worlds as they are today. In order to teach that continuum, I break up the course I teach around it chronologically, through different, but distinctive, periods in history. Over time the students begin to see patterns. Early in the semester I send them to the Wikipedia page detailing nearly 100 kinds of human biases and pathologies that go into concocting, and in many cases believing in, “fake news.” If you go through the list, you can plop different forgeries from the collection into in almost every category there. Forgery is also about persuasion, and certain forgeries have specific attributes. Hoaxes, for example, very often capitalize on the recent appearance of new technologies of observation and communication, but they also need to be popular to succeed, otherwise they don’t do what they’re supposed to do, duping the masses.
At least for now, my students can’t use AI to help them write their papers because AI hasn’t been designed to generate to fake stuff or how to defend it, as my students must do one the course of the semester. I started asking ChatGPT about great forgeries, and it barely knew any of them because it of the nature of the large language models that are being generated. This will surely change, but it’s telling for now.
Their first assignment is to write a fake letter from the ancient world, and it has to be plausible; these two interlocutors might have already have real letters between them that survive, and then students just interpolate a “lost” letter that has only now been rediscovered. Then they’re required to defend the forgery. They have to describe the physical artifact, where it is, and where it was found. If they mention the work of “experts,” I ask who? Where? If they say imaging was done to try to date the artifact, I ask them: with which technology specifically? They have to keep elaborating until they’ve persuaded me that their concoctions, if not probable, could at least be somewhat plausible.
I help them find that spot where they create a willing suspension of disbelief, and they learn how to lie about a lie. That actually helps them get to the truth in really powerful ways, sort of like discovering muscles they didn’t know they had. It makes them “media literate” in so many ways that they had not really thought about before in many cases.
This collection is arguably an acknowledgment of the merits of fakery. When I think of recent literary hoaxes—James Frey’s memoir comes to mind—the reaction was outrage. People felt defrauded. Why do we delight in some embodiments of forgeries, and even sometimes pay for them, while other times we ostracize the forger?
We often have an assumption that we’re owed the truth, and that we should be seeking it, although that’s not quite as firm a thing as it used to be in the world in which we select our facts and our news feeds. The virtue of this collection is that it puts media literacy at the center—teaching how to detect clues that should cause you, or even compel you, to be more skeptical and more critical of everything you encounter, no matter how “authoritative” seeming the source.
If you’re asking what’s the point of a collection like this? Well, it’s a record of fabulous scholarship. Most successful forgers were smart and creative people, and many of their forgeries were consummate, even ingenious. There’s also an economy to forgery, like you want to give the reader enough to suspend their disbelief, but not any more than that because you can hang yourself by your own petard, as it were, with too much information. And often, that was exactly how forgeries were eventually demolished.
There’s no manual on how to invent forgeries. Take Bata Kindai Amgoza ibn LoBagola, who pretended to be this African native descended from the Lost Tribe of Israel but was actually born in Baltimore in the Jim Crow South. He tried to escape poverty and racism by inventing a whole other persona world of an African from the bush who comes off as strangely wise and exotic, concocting all sorts of pithy Yoda-like sayings. Knopf published his autobiography. He was on the lecture circuit in New York City and elsewhere. I almost feel like he was exacting a kind of elaborate revenge against racial discrimination in America. I suppose there’s a kind of perverse justice to the whole episode on some level.
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But the Bibliotheca Fictiva is also a record of how throughout history, none of these things stood the test of time. As we develop scholarly skills—whether it be paleography or diplomatics, that is, the study of manuscript forms and how you can figure out whether things are anachronistic or not, to other kinds of methods of forensic scholarship, like philological analysis and the collation of texts—forgeries are usually found out.
The most famous is probably the Donation of Constantine. There’s a fresco of this in the Vatican Palace depicting as a real event something that was entirely rooted in a medieval forgery “documenting” Constantine’s decision to hand over Rome, and indeed all of Europe, to the pope as the emperor department for his new capital of Constantinople. That later became the foundational precedent for centuries of papal claims to secular authority over the papal states of the Romagna.
Lorenzo Valla, a brilliant scholar of the mid-fifteenth century, totally destroyed and demolished the text of the Donation on every conceivable level. Ultimately, though, he proved that it was a fake because it deployed words that didn’t exist at the time that it claimed to have been written. That’s how a lot of forgery demolitions get worked out.
I understand why people now try to push fake news—maybe they’re trying to get people to join their political side, or they’re profit driven. What would be the reason to forge Dead Sea Scrolls or create the apocryphal Book of Judith.
Well, very few female voices are heard in the Bible, particularly in the New Testament. And a lot of the pseudepigrapha, like the fake gospels and fake apocalypses, fill in gaps in the record that can serve latter-day, post-biblical purposes. One I love, the Gnostic Apocalypse of Adam, tells what happened to Adam and Eve after they were expelled from the Garden of Eden and offers up theological interpretations that promote the Gnostic faith tradition in ways the Book of Genesis did not.
Fan fiction.
This always floors people: the Bible doesn’t actually tell us what Jesus Christ looked like. At all. But there have literally been billions of people over the past two millennia who would have liked to know this. So, in the Middle Ages, somebody decided to fix that, and they wrote the Letter of Publius Lentulus, a fake epistle supposedly written by a Roman in Palestine who was an eyewitness to Jesus’s activities. He ostensibly wrote to the Senate in Rome describing Jesus as having chestnut hair, smooth at the top and curly down to his shoulders, with gray eyes and no blemishes. That’s preserved in over 300 medieval and Renaissance manuscript witnesses and has served as the basis of untold thousands of visual representations of Jesus Christ.
Or the so-called “Letter from Heaven.” At some point following the Christian revelation in the New Testament the decision was taken in heaven to change the day of the Sabbath from the Jewish Saturday to the Christian Sunday.
So, the letter is sent down to earth sixty-three years after Christ’s crucifixion and placed under a large rock in the holy land with an inscription on top: “Blessed is he that shall turn me over.” People saw this strange-looking rock and tried to pick it up, but none could until this innocent little boy succeeded, delivering it to authorities. In the letter itself, Jesus has given the proviso that “he who copyeth this letter shall be blessed,” but “he that that destroyeth this letter will be cursed.” It’s possibly the first chain letter in history, thought to date originally to the sixth century. We have broadsides of the Letter printed in the late eighteenth century in the collection!
Besides religion, what are other possible reasons a person might have executed a forgery?
In the earlier periods, a lot of it is what I call “patriotic mythology.” For example, the Italians expressed anxiety during the Renaissance, following the revival of Greco-Roman culture, that they came long after the Greeks, and there’s this idea that the one who came first is always the most important, the most influential and authoritative culture. So the Dominican Annius of Viterbo decided to “discover” a sequence of previously lost ancient texts written by a Babylonian, a Jew, a Christian, a Roman, an Egyptian, and all these others, around which Annius wrote ingenious commentaries. Of course, he forged all of it, mostly with the aim of demonstrating that the ancient Egyptian god Osiris ultimately resettled in Viterbo, Italy, which then became the epicenter of all human culture, not to mention Annius’s own hometown.
He planted fake hieroglyphs in the dirt and then staged excavations digging them up to prove that the Italians are really possessed of the most ancient lineage, while those mendacious Greeks who thought they invented everything were actually latest to the table in shaping human civilization. The French soon got into the act by inventing the so-called Dijon Druids, who apparently had access to ancient Greek culture long before the Romans were ever even a thing, giving them an impossibly early pedigree as well. The Gauls had been described as barbarians by Julius Caesar and Livy, but now had become these Ur people, far more ancient and civilized than their ancient Roman detractors. And then the English joined in, claiming that Joseph of Arimathea brought the holy grail containing the blood and sweat of the crucified Christ to Glastonbury. Even the Swedes go in on the game. We have a facsimile of an unfortunately “lost” Runic manuscript describing how one figure left ancient Sweden to go to Greece to study with Pythagoras, returning home with the wisdom of the Greek laws.
The era of pecuniary forgery is yet another distinctive phenomenon in the history of forgery, mostly occurring during the period of “bibliomania” in the nineteenth century, a time when more and more wealthy people in Europe and in the United States began to value and seek to acquire impossible rarities in the form of rare books and manuscripts; they pined for, among other things, books from Shakespeare’s personal library bearing his “autograph” annotations, no less.
Skilled forgers started to catch on, endeavoring to cash in on that development. Nearly every duke and earl and baron in England was competing to build great rare book collections, and lots and lots of fake manuscripts emerged. Americans are super patriotic collectors of their own history, so it should comes at no surprise, for example, that one of the most forged signatures in American history is George Washington’s. He slept everywhere, right?
It’s fascinating. A fake document can be as illuminating as an authentic one depending on where we are in a particular historical moment.
Right, like we read imaginative literature because it’s a creative expression of an author at a certain time in history. Shakespeare set numerous plays in ancient Rome, but he makes his characters Elizabethans, using Elizabethan language. If you stop judging forgeries as immoral tissues of lies, you can begin to learn what people tried to lie about at different times and how, and for what specific audiences—then forgery can emerge as extremely illuminating.
Is there a link between literary forgery and art forgery?
Art forgery’s difficult. On one level its assessment can be quite subjective, and there’s a degree of connoisseurship. Where does attribution end? How firm do you need something to be to firmly attribute a painting to Peter Paul Rubens or to his studio?
We do spectroscopy and carbon dating for certain things. We know that the Vinland Map at Yale is not a pre-Columbian map of America. It was forged probably in the twentieth century because the ink has material in it that didn’t exist before the testing of the atomic bomb.
But the technology to detect that when Paul Mellon bought it in the middle of the twentieth century to give to the Beinecke Library at Yale didn’t exist yet.
The forensic study of art forgery is way more advanced than that of literary forgery because the stakes are also often much higher, particularly when you are talking about Old Master paintings worth hundreds of thousands, even millions, of dollars.
Another aspect of literary forgery is that it’s ludic, which is the Latin word for something “playful.” Because forgery requires imagination and creativity, yes, it may seem at times fringe, but it’s nevertheless somewhat ingenious, even inspiring on some level.
There’s a performative aspect to all of it, and we can laugh about this stuff now, but you know, there are and were people who actually believed some of these forgeries were quite true and a distinctive part of the historical record.
If people want to read more about this, what books do you recommend?
We’ve all lied at some point in our lives about something, whether it’s a white lie or something worse. And so we’re all part of this culture, but scholars until very recently often didn’t want to have anything to do with the story of forgery because it was immoral and sometimes a bit icky—I don’t want people to think I’m interested in lying. But one scholar, Anthony Grafton, who about thirty years ago published Forgers and Critics, focused on how in the early modern period, there was this enormous flourishing not only of culture but also of liars. And he documented a lot of it in one place for the first time.
I published a catalog that you can order online called Fakes, Lies, and Forgeries, and it’s essentially an exhibition catalog of the collection. You can order it online.
What are among the most popular items in the collection?
We have an ancient Greek manuscript that was written by Constantine Simonides in the nineteenth century revealing the lost secrets of Greek painting in late antiquity. It was bought by the most famous collector of the era of bibliomania, Sir Thomas Phillips. He later wrote on the first page that he bought it knowing it was fake…but who’s to say?
We have Curzio Inghirami’s illustrated facsimiles of all of the scariths, little time capsules made of wax and bitumen that he planted all over his estate in Volterra in the middle of the seventeenth century and then “discovered” with his friends. They revealed ancient Etruscan manuscripts that predicted the coming of Christ even before his birth, elevating the ancient Volterrans as actually having been granted prescience of the Christian revelation. It’s a fabulously illustrated book whose title page says nothing that’s actually true (it even claims to have been printed in Frankfurt, rather than Italy, and uses a fake printer’s device). Roundly condemned as an archaeological hoax by scholars, Inghirami undertook to publish a 1,000-page defense of his forgery. My friend and colleague Ingrid Rowland has written a wonderful book about that called The Scarith of Scoronello; it’s worth reading. Some of the autograph forgeries, you know, like Major Byron, are very popular as well because people just can’t believe how many there are. Specializing in forging the handwriting of Lord Byron, Major Byron was among the most prolific autograph forgers of the nineteenth century.
If you start Googling impostors, you’re going find hundreds of them throughout history, but mostly from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I also recommend have a look at the Museum of Hoaxes online, it’s really a scream. You know that line from Sir Walter Scott, “Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.” A tangled web indeed!
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