We see that javascript is disabled or not supported by your browser - javascript is needed for important actions on the site. Read more

What's New - Home - Login

Member $avings: $81,565,228.09 | Books Available: 796,273 | Members Online: 218

Swap Used Books - Buy New Books at Great Prices!

How To Swap Books Sign Up Search submenu

PBS Market (New Books)

Gift Buying Guide

Book Browser Advanced Search Books Posted Today Member Book Reviews Award Winning Books NYT Best Sellers Amazon Best Sellers Most Traveled Copies Club Wish List

Discussion Forums Book Lists

Club Lists My Book Lists My Watched Lists Create a List

Blog Donations

School Donation Program In Memory of... Military Donation Program Friends of PBS

Box-O-Books Maps The Eclectic Pen Fun Stuff

20 Questions Sudoku Bookmark Creator

Top 100

Requests Posts Swappers Referrers Reviewers

Pulse of PBS Spread The Word

Invite Friends Bookmarks Facebook Page Facebook App More Ways...

Photo Gallery Recipes Club Tag Cloud Member Testimonials

Help Center submenu

How To Swap Books Browse Help Docs Ask the Librarian PBS Member Icons Live Help

Kiosk

PBS Market (New Books) Go Shopping Buy Credits Buy PBS Money Upgrade Membership Gift Certificates Transfer Credits

Need Help?

Search - Forgers and Critics

Forgers and Critics
Author: Anthony Grafton

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 t... more »hrough the recent past, who produced a variety of splendid triumphs of learning and style, and scholarly detectives, who honed the tools of scholarship in attempts to unmask these skillful fakers. In the process he discloses the extent, the coherence, and the historical interest of two significant and tightly intertwined strands in the Western intellectual tradition. "The desire to forge," writes the author, "can bite and infect almost anyone: . . . the honest as well as the rogue." Forgers are inspired not only by ambition or greed but also by impulses to play jokes, exuberant desires to see the past made whole again, or serious wishes to invoke divine or distantly historical authority for particular spiritual or national traditions. Whatever their goals, forgers in classical antiquity as well as in the modern era have often been well ahead of critics in the pursuit of methods of authenticating documents, and Grafton shows that many techniques normally considered the invention of scholars in early modern Europe were already employed in classical times. This accessible work discusses forgers as different from each other as Dionysus the "Renegade," Erasmus, Carlo Sigonio, James Macpherson ("Ossian"), Thomas Chatterton, and the great sixteenth-century Dominican scholar Giovanni Nanni (Annius) of Viterbo, whose forged histories by Berosus, Manetho, and other ancient authors drove the real histories of the ancient world from the literary marketplace for almost a hundred years. One chapter is devoted to comparing three scholars--Porphyry (third century), Isaac Casaubon (1559-1614), and Richard Reitzenstein (1861-1931)--whose efforts to deal with the same body of forged material, the Hermetica, reveal both continuity and change in critical method. What emerges from Forgers and Critics is a new appreciation for a strange literary genre that has flourished for over 2500 years--amusing its uninvolved observers, enraging its humiliated victims, and, most importantly, contributing to a richer sense of what the past was really like.

ISBN-13: 9780691055442
ISBN-10: 0691055440
Publication Date: 3/7/1990
Pages: 168
Rating:

0 stars, based on 0 rating

Publisher: Princeton University Press
Book Type: Hardcover
Members Wishing: 2
Reviews: Amazon | Write a Review

Genres:

Literature & Fiction >> History & Criticism >> Criticism & Theory >> General
Crafts, Hobbies & Home >> Antiques & Collectibles >> Books

Back to the Top ↑

Search - Forgers and Critics

Loading...