Volume 37, Number 19 · December 6, 1990
The Uses of Fakery
By Hugh Trevor-Roper
Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship
by Anthony Grafton
Princeton University Press, 157 pp., $14.95
There are many varieties of forgery in intellectual history, and they are not easy to separate. There is the physical manufacture of false documents, which is forgery in the strict sense; there is the false attribution of real documents, which then become 'pseudepigrapha'; and there is the invocation and exploitation of invisible documents, which, if they remain obstinately invisible, are designated as 'ghosts.' Only the first of these processes necessarily entails deception—the others can be the result of mere error; but whenever deliberate deception is involved, they can all be treated as forgery and included in a study of forgery. Mens rea—the consciousness of deceit—is the ultimate criterion.
Review, 3681 words
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