by Umberto Eco
51. The phrase quasi liber et pictura is a line from the Latin poem quoted in Chapter 3 (section 3.3). At this point we may even find ourselves annoyed by the barking of a dog which has abandoned the pages of the theologians and invaded the nights of lovers and robbers. Two centuries after Bacon (1544), Michelangelo Biondo will reveal a trick to stop a dog barking, which he apparently learned from the thieves themselves, interrupted in the course of their night’s work, as well as from lovers, disturbed as they attempted to scale their mistress’s balcony. All you have to do is to swallow or drink a dog’s heart, duly baked and reduced to a powder: “Accepimus a quibusdam, quod cum quis latratum canis vult cohibere ne illi sit impedimento in quibusdam peragendis (quod maxime amantibus ad amantes accedentibus nocere solet et furibus nocturnis) itaque cor canis edat, quamvis dicunt quidam quod potatum praestantius est; ideo ustum redigatur in pulverem et deglutiatur, quoniam latratum canis comprimet; quod furibus et amantibus dimittimus credendum.” Which is a bit like catching a bird by sprinkling salt on its tail. See De canibus et venatione libellus, “Ad latratum,” Rome 1544. Partial ed. in Arte della caccia, ed. G. Innamorati, vol. 1, Milano, Panfilo, 1965.
5
Fakes and Forgeries in the Middle Ages
The modern reader, nurtured on philology, is aware that many forgeries were perpetrated in the course of the Middle Ages. But were the people of the Middle Ages similarly aware? Did they recognize the notion of forgery? And if they recognized the notion, was it the same as our own?
In formulating these questions, we find ourselves compelled to analyze a series of terms—like falsification, fake, forgery, false attribution, diplomatic forgery, alteration, counterfeit, facsimile, and so on—that we nowadays take for granted. If we are to decide whether similar concepts existed in the Middle Ages, we are inevitably obliged to take a closer look at our own contemporary concepts.
It is no accident that dictionaries and encyclopedias, in defining falsification, place the emphasis on malicious intent, introducing—without defining them—concepts such as counterfeit, spurious, apocryphal, pseudo, and so on. Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, for instance, defines forgery as “the act of forging, fabricating or producing falsely; especially the crime of fraudulently making, counterfeiting, or altering any writing, record, instrument, register, note and the like to deceive, mislead or defraud; as the forgery of a document or of a signature.”1
The dictionaries are also vague on the distinction between spurious, apocryphal, and pseudo. Spurious is used for nonauthentic or falsified works and documents, but also for an illegitimate child born from an adulterous relationship. In the natural sciences, it refers to organs that resemble other organs without having their function. For example, the spurious ribs are two lower ribs on either side of the skeleton that do not reach as far as the sternum; in zoology, the spurious or bastard wing (or alula) is a tuft of accessory flight feathers growing on the first digit of the bird’s wing, behind the wing’s angle, in some cases substituted by a nail or spur; in botany, it indicates an apparatus or organ that resembles another organ with a different structure or function.
In German the same phenomenon is rendered with the prefix pseudo. Webster gives apocryphal as a synonym of spurious (“Apocryphal: various writings falsely attributed … of doubtful authorship or authenticity … spurious”). In fact, apokryphos originally meant occult and secret; apocryphal gospels and other biblical writings got the name because people weren’t allowed to read them—and as such they were excluded from among the canonical books. Hence, “apocryphal” came to signify “excluded from the canon.” Subsequently, late Jewish authors attribute their writings to the ancient prophets, and these books are termed pseudonymous or pseudoepigraphical. It should be observed, however, that Catholics describe the noncanonical books as apocryphal, while the books accepted in the Greek version of the Septuagint are said to be deuterocanonical. For Protestants on the other hand it is the deuterocanonical books that are apocryphal while the ones Catholics call apocryphal are pseudoepigraphical.2
5.1. The Semiotics of Forgery
Given the complexity of the notion of forgery, if we are to understand what might have been considered a forgery in the Middle Ages, we must proceed to clarify the various related concepts.3
5.1.1. Doubles
The first thing we must consider is the semiosic concept known as replicability. The most complete instance of replicability is the double, a physical token that has all the characteristics of another physical token, at least from a practical point of view, insofar as both possess all the pertinent traits prescribed by an abstract type. In this sense, two chairs of the same model or two sheets of office paper are both doubles of one another, and the perfect homology between the two tokens is established with reference to their type. Doubles do not lend themselves to the deceit of falsification in that every token has the same practical value as every other, and each one can substitute for the other. A double is not identical with another double (in the Leibnizian sense of indiscernibility), in other words, two tokens of the same type are—and are recognized as—two different physical objects. Nevertheless, they are considered interchangeable.
Theoretically speaking, we have two reciprocal doubles when, given two objects, Oa and Ob, their matter displays the same physical characteristics, in the sense of their molecular composition, and their form is similar, in the mathematical sense of congruence (the features to be compared for similarity are determined by the type). But who is to determine the criteria for similarity? The problem of doubles is ontological in theory, but pragmatic in practice. It is the user who decides under which description—that is, from what practical standpoint—the two matters and the two forms are, ceteris paribus, “objectively” similar, and therefore, from the practical point of view, interchangeable. Under a microscopic analysis, or in the light of other chemical tests, it could be proven that two sheets of office paper of different brands display fairly relevant differences, but a normal user habitually sees them as doubles (and hence interchangeable) in every respect.
5.1.2. Pseudo-Doubles
We have a case of pseudo-doubles when only one token of the type (the privileged token) takes on a special value in the eye of one or more users, for one or all of the following reasons: (i) on account of temporal priority, such as occurs for instance when the first product off the assembly line of particular model of automobile (if it can be identified as the first) is displayed in a museum as a unique specimen;4 (ii) because that particular token contains evidence of previous possession, as occurs in the case of a copy of a book with an inscription by the author or the signature of an illustrious former owner; (iii) because that token has been used in a special context (this would be the case with the Holy Grail, the chalice used by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, if it could ever be discovered and authenticated); (iv) because the particular token is of such material and formal complexity that no attempt to imitate it can reproduce all the characteristics recognized as relevant (a typical case would be an oil painting on canvas painted in a particular style with special paints, so that the chromatic shadings, the microscopic grain of the canvas, the flow of the brushstrokes—all features judged indispensable to the total fruition of the object—can never be completely imitated.5 In all of the above cases, for various reasons, these “unique” objects become the type of themselves, and any reproduction of these objects, when not honestly presented as a facsimile or imperfect copy produced for a didactic or documentary purpose, is made with a false identification in mind.6
5.1.3. False Identification
We have false identification when, given a hypothetical object Oa, produced by author A in historical circumstances t1, and, given another object Ob, produced by author B in historical circumstances t2, somebody (an individual or a group) decides that Ob is identical with Oa, to the point of being indiscernible. In the concept of falsification the malicious intentions of the falsifier are generally implicit. The problem of malice on the part of B,
the author of Ob, seems to us irrelevant: he is fully aware that Ob is not identical to Oa, but he may have produced it with no intention to deceive, as an exercise, as a joke, or by mere chance. The Constitutum Constantini (Donation of Constantine) was probably first produced as a rhetorical exercise, and it was only in later centuries that (in good or bad faith) it came to be considered authentic (see De Leo 1974). What interests us more is the intention of the person performing the false identification (the Identifier) who asserts that Oa and Ob are identical (of course, in a case of malice aforethought, the Identifier and author B of Ob may be one and the same person).
Historical forgery does not belong in this category. It concerns a document Ob, produced by B, who is entitled to produce it as his own, but whose purpose in producing it is to assert (in a mendacious fashion) something inexact or invented. This is the case, for instance, when someone writes a letter bearing false witness, a report that misrepresents the results of a scientific experiment, a dispatch or communiqué issued by a government that lies about the results of an election (electoral fraud), and so on. A historical forgery is an instance of a deliberate lie and in this sense it is to be distinguished from a diplomatic forgery, which we will come to later.7
5.2. Difficulties of Authentication Procedures
In order for a process of false identification to occur a culture must have criteria, considered somehow objective, by which to establish indiscernibility or equivalence between objects, and therefore criteria for establishing the authenticity of an object Ob. These criteria can be valid (i) for objects that were not produced for communicative purposes, such as paleontological finds, objects in use in archaic or primitive cultures (which can be interpreted as signs, symptoms, traces, or clues to events distant in space and time); or (ii) for objects produced for explicitly communicative purposes (documents, visual works of art, hieroglyphic inscriptions, epigraphs, etc.). Both kinds of objects are generally understood to be “documents,” though objects belonging to type (ii) are considered both for their expression and their content, while objects belonging to type (i) are evaluated only for their expression, seeing that the content (or meaning) attributed to them by the addressee did not exist for the sender (the archaic producer of an iron knife blade undoubtedly intended to signify the practical function of the object he was constructing, but only the modern archeologist reads that knife as a sign of the fact that, when it was produced, people knew how to work iron).
The contemporary disciplines of identification (which we will refer to generically as philological disciplines) recognize four methods of authentication. We will see, case by case, that the criteria available to medieval culture were far more vague.
5.2.1. Authentication at the Level of the Material Support of the Text
We have physicochemical methods for determining the period of fabrication and the quality of the material support (parchment, paper, canvas, wood, etc.). Nowadays these methods are considered sufficiently scientific, and therefore intersubjectively verifiable, but the medieval scholar almost never had the opportunity to encounter original documents in their original language (even the translators were working from manuscripts at a considerable remove from their archetypes), and all they knew of past civilizations were seriously contaminated ruins. Christianity discovers history (the sequence creation-original sin-redemption-parousia), but not historiography. It knows the past solely through the information handed down by tradition. The legal opinions handed down in the High Middle Ages ascertaining the counterfeit nature of the documents produced by one of the litigating parties confine themselves at best to a discussion of the authenticity of the seal. Remi of Trèves asks Gerbert d’Aurillac (the future pope Sylvester II) to send him one of his leather armillary spheres, and Gerbert (an enthusiast of the classical authors) asks for a copy of Statius’s Achilleid in exchange. Remi sends it to him; but the Achilleid was left unfinished by its author. Gerbert is unaware of this and accuses Remi of sending him a defective manuscript and, to punish him, sends him an inferior painted wooden sphere. Gerbert had no accredited sources for knowing the physical conditions of the original manuscript (see Havet 1889: 983–997 and Gilson 1952: 228–229).
The cautionary tale of the reception and translations of the Corpus Dionysianum is an episode worthy of reflection. When Byzantine emperor Michael II the Stammerer sent it as a gift to Frankish king Louis the Pious in 827 as the work of a disciple of Saint Paul who was the first bishop of Paris, no one thought to question its authenticity. The testimony of the donor, the prestige of the alleged author, the interest of the text—all were sufficient guarantees. Scotus Eriugena had doubts about the identity of Paul’s disciple and the first bishop of Paris, but not about the venerable age of the text.
5.2.2. Authentication at the Level of Textual Manifestation
The form of the document must be in keeping with the rules of formation of the period to which it is attributed. The first example of philological analysis based on the form of the expression was provided in the fifteenth century by Lorenzo Valla (De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio, XIII), when he demonstrated that the use of certain linguistic expressions in Latin was completely implausible at the beginning of the fourth century A.D. Isaac Casaubon (De rebus sacris et ecclesiasticis exercitationes, XIV) proved that the Corpus Hermeticum was not a Greek translation of an ancient Egyptian text, because it did not contain a single trace of Egyptian idiomatic expressions. Modern philologists have shown that the Hermetic Asclepius was not translated, as was once believed, by Marius Victorinus, because in all his writings Victorinus always put the conjunction etenim at the beginning of the sentence, whereas in the Asclepius the word occurs in the second position twenty-one times out of twenty-five.
According to the semiosic system, recourse is made to paleographic, epigraphic, lexicographic, grammatical, iconographic, and stylistic and other criteria. These methods are today judged sufficiently scientific, even when based on conjecture. The Middle Ages had no paleographic criteria, and its lexicographic, grammatical, and stylistic criteria were fairly vague. Men like Augustine and Abelard, and eventually scholars like Thomas Aquinas, recognized the problem of establishing the reliability of a text on the basis of its linguistic features. But, apropos of the text of the Bible, Augustine, who had small Greek and less Hebrew, in the pages where he discusses the technique of emendatio, advises at most to compare the various Latin translations with each other, in order to make a conjecture, taking account of the differences, about the “correct” reading of the text. He is looking for a “good” text, not the original text, and he rejects the idea of checking the Hebrew version because he believes it has been manipulated by the Jews: hence, not only does he not go back to the presumed original, he mistrusts it. Better a translation inspired by God that an original corrupted by a malicious intent (De doctrina christiana 2, 11–14).
As Marrou (1958) remarks, none of his commentaries presupposes a preliminary effort to establish a critical text. There is no analysis of the manuscript tradition. Saint Augustine is content to compare the largest possible number of manuscripts and to take into consideration the largest possible number of variants.
When Saint Jerome’s translation ex hebraeo conflicts with that of the Septuagint, Augustine tends to suspect Jerome’s translation, because he considers the Septuagint divinely inspired. He never chooses the Vulgate over the Septuagint. In the De civitate Dei (15, 10–11), in calculating the age of Methuselah, the text of the Septuagint (but not the Vulgate) is contradictory, since it has Methuselah die after the Flood, but Augustine refrains from committing himself, suggesting the hypothesis of a correction introduced by the perfidious Jews to undermine the confidence of Christians vis-à-vis the Septuagint version. It is curious that Augustine should think that the Hebrew original might be corrupt (a useful suspicion on the part of a philologist), while he is not overly concerned over the corruptness of the translations, convinced that he can resolve the issues with a bland comparative
approach, in which the last word will be uttered not by philology but by a righteous will to interpret and fidelity to traditional knowledge (see Marrou 1958: 432–434).
Bede and other authors analyze the rhetorical figures of Holy Scripture, but they are ignorant of the Hebrew original, and the language they are analyzing is that of a translation. It is not until the thirteenth century that an effort will be made to return to the Hebrew original with the help of converted Jews (see Chenu 1950: 117–125 and 206).
In any case, etymological practice has much to teach us about the weakness of medieval philology, whether the etymologies in question be those of Isidore of Seville or Virgil of Toulouse. Medieval etymology has nothing to do with the history of the lexicon. It is philosophical, theological, moral, or poetic. Every medieval etymology is, from the etymological point of view, a fake.
As for their insensitivity to language, the case of the thirteenth-century Modistae (see Chapter 7) is exemplary: all of their speculative grammar is an example of philological highhandedness. They attempt to elaborate a general theory of language on the basis of a single language, Latin. They do not believe that other languages displaying other grammatical (and therefore mental) structures exist. They identify modus essendi and modus significandi. Their ethnocentric impermeability is equal only to that of those twentieth-century Anglo-Saxon linguists who construct theories of linguistic universals on the basic of a single language, English.
