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Fake Blues: Exposures of Forgeries and their Aftermaths

Friday 18 June 2021, 2.00PM to 7:00 PM

This workshop will investigate the unhappy state of mind of those people in history who have been taken in by fakes and forgeries, as well as the afterlives of forged texts. What effect did the exposure and revelation of their gullibility have on the reception of forgeries? The Donation of Constantine, for example, was defended by high-ranking members of the Catholic Church for another century after Lorenzo Valla’s astute criticism. The Reformation lent further urgency to these discussions, when polemicists on both sides of the confessional divide – Catholic and Protestant – often accepted or rejected the results of the humanists on the basis of religious and political expediency.

To date, many historians have focussed their attention on the discussion of forgery in ecclesiastical history. This workshop therefore aims to move beyond this genre, to discuss the study of forgery in other disciplines, such as the history of science, literature and art. It will ask questions such as: what were the similarities and differences in the reception of legends, myths, falsely attributed texts and forged documents? How did invention, translation, and circulation of texts inflect upon one another?

Programme (Online): 18 June 2021

2.00pm (London time/3:00pm Brussels/9:00am New York !): Welcome and Introduction, Stefan Bauer and Magnus Ryan

2.15pm-3.15pm:

Chair: Stefan Bauer (Warwick University/CREMS-York)

Alfred Hiatt (Queen Mary): The Donation of Constantine in 1439

Ovanes Akopyan (Innsbruck): “Moscus, father of the Muscovites”: the history of a Renaissance forgery and its aftermath

Discussion and short break

3.15pm-4.30pm:

Chair: Scott Mandelbrote (Peterhouse, Cambridge)

Andreea Badea (Frankfurt am Main): Celebrating the glimpse through the keyhole: Antoine Varillas and the commercialization of the forged sources

Jacqueline Hylkema (Leiden): Forgery in early modern art histories: Karel van Mander and the aftermath of Hendrick Goltzius’ The Circumcision (1594)

Gianamar Giovannetti-Singh (Cambridge): “Pas si candide, M. Voltaire”: the weaponisation of the Ezourvedam in the emergence of theories of human genesis, 1760-1799

Discussion and short break

4.30pm-5pm:

Chair: Stefan Bauer

Joanna Urbanek (Brussels): Introduction to the exhibition “Fake for real: a history of forgery and falsification“, House of European History, Brussels

Discussion

5pm-6pm:

Chair: Bridget Kendall (Peterhouse, Cambridge)

Emmett Sullivan (Royal Holloway): The falsification of history through image manipulation

Chris Morris (BBC): Reality check at the BBC

Discussion

 

Please register to attend here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/fake-blues-exposures-of-forgeries-and-their-aftermaths-tickets-148185734521

Location: Zoom

Admission: Eventbrite