{"product_id":"forgers-and-critics-creativity-and-duplicity-in-western-scholarship-9780691055442","title":"Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship","description":"\u003cp\u003eJust 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 through 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.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45647613263925,"sku":"ByrdShop_0691055440","price":29.8,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780691055442.jpg?v=1781695751","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/forgers-and-critics-creativity-and-duplicity-in-western-scholarship-9780691055442","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}