Forgers and critics : creativity and duplicity in Western scholarship
Just as it takes 'a thief to catch a thief', soo the forger greatly aids the search for historical truth, maintains Antony Grafton in this wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship.Labelling forgery th 'criminal sibling" of criticism, he describes a pa...
Enregistré dans:
| Hovedforfatter: | |
|---|---|
| Format: | Livre papier |
| Sprog: | Anglais |
| Udgivet: |
London :
Collins & Brown
1990.
|
| Serier: | Juliet Gardiner books
|
| Fag: | |
| Kommentar: |
Fonds Ferrary |
| Autres localisations: | Voir dans le Sudoc |
| Summary: | Just as it takes 'a thief to catch a thief', soo the forger greatly aids the search for historical truth, maintains Antony Grafton in this wide-ranging exploration of the links between forgery and scholarship.Labelling forgery th '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 skiful fakers. In the process he discloses the extent, the coherence, and the historical interest of two significant and tightly interwined 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, exuberat desires to see the past made whole again, or serious wishes to invoke divine or distantly historical authority for partiular spiritual or national traditions. Whatever their goals, forgers in classical antiquity as well as in the modern era have often been well ahead of the 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. What emerges from Forgers and Critics is a new appreciation of a strange literary genre that has flourished for over 2,500 years - amusing its uninvolved observers, enraging its humiliated victims, and, most importantly, contributing to a richer sense of what the past was really like. |
|---|---|
| Emne beskrivelse: | Fonds Ferrary |
| Fysisk beskrivelse: | 1 vol. (X-157 p.) : ill. ; 23 cm. |
| Bibliografi: | Bibliographie p.129-150. Index |
| ISBN: | 1855850869 |