“Liars Must Have Good Memories”: Thinking with Forgery in Renaissance Europe and Beyond
Lecture by Frederic Clark
Held online by the House of European History on November 25, 2021
In recent years, examinations of forgery have proliferated across various academic fields and disciplines, so much so that it is now possible to speak of something like “forgery studies” as a coherent enterprise. Studies of this sort have revised some traditional narratives, particularly older triumphalist tales of the emergence of philology, historicism, and “rational criticism” in Renaissance Europe. Since at least the eighteenth century, if not before, Renaissance critics — including Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus — were celebrated for their debunking of forgeries, and their supposed attacks against falsification and dogmatism alike. Yet forgery and falsehood still flourished in the Renaissance, just as they do in our own age.
Frederic Clark is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California. He is a cultural and intellectual historian who specializes in the afterlife of classical antiquity in medieval and early modern Europe. Click here to visit his university webpage.
“Liars Must Have Good Memories”: Thinking with Forgery in Renaissance Europe and Beyond
Lecture by Frederic Clark
Held online by the House of European History on November 25, 2021
In recent years, examinations of forgery have proliferated across various academic fields and disciplines, so much so that it is now possible to speak of something like “forgery studies” as a coherent enterprise. Studies of this sort have revised some traditional narratives, particularly older triumphalist tales of the emergence of philology, historicism, and “rational criticism” in Renaissance Europe. Since at least the eighteenth century, if not before, Renaissance critics — including Lorenzo Valla and Erasmus — were celebrated for their debunking of forgeries, and their supposed attacks against falsification and dogmatism alike. Yet forgery and falsehood still flourished in the Renaissance, just as they do in our own age.
Frederic Clark is an Assistant Professor of Classics at the University of Southern California. He is a cultural and intellectual historian who specializes in the afterlife of classical antiquity in medieval and early modern Europe. Click here to visit his university webpage.
Please also visit the House of European History website
Top Image: Depiction of the Donation of Constantine – Wikimedia Commons
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