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)
