forging links with the past

University of Pennsylvania Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the History of Ideas.

http://www.jstor.org

Review: Forging Links with the Past Author(s): James Hankins Review by: James Hankins Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1991), pp. 509-518Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2710049Accessed: 09-02-2016 15:17 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 128.103.149.52 on Tue, 09 Feb 2016 15:17:55 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/publisher/upenn

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2710049

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp



Forging Links with the Past

James Hankins

Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Schol- arship (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Mark Jones, with Paul Craddock and Nicolas Barker, eds., Fake? The Art of Deception (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990).

Paul Veyne, Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? An Essay on the Constitutive Imagination, tr. Paula Wissing (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1988).

William McCuaig, Carlo Sigonio: The Changing World of the Late Renaissance (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1989).

Dear Tony, I've finally gotten around to reading your Forgers and Critics and thought I'd

throw you my usual bouquet of praise along with some quibbles. First, let me say I was delighted with the style of the book. In the past I've always read your stuff with the keenest interest and with great admiration for your learning and range, but, to be frank, I've sometimes found the prose a bit dense. At the same time, I've envied your ability in lectures to make what seem to be the dryest subjects positively ooze with fascination. Now it seems to me that you've at last managed to transfer the liveliness and wit of your lecturing style to cold prose. So many good stories: "I laughed out loud," as the reviewers say. I particularly liked the image of the aboriginal Indo-Frisians, Friso, Saxo and Bruno, "three gentlemen in frock coats sitting around a peat fire, murmuring politely in San- skrit"-a scene out of Gilbert and Sullivan. It's too bad you finished the book before the British Museum show last summer on fakes. I take it you didn't see it? I tried to; I was working at the British Library for a few days in June and saved an afternoon for it, but when the afternoon came, I kept running into former students. In the end I had hardly more than an hour and a half to see it; I could have spent two days easily. At least I bought the catalogue, which I heartily recommend. It's not only beautifully produced but it's also a serious piece of scholarship. Nor is it just about artistic fakes, as the title seems to suggest. It also has lots about literary forgeries, frauds, and propaganda in all periods and in both Western and non-Western countries. Very thought-provoking about the way the boundaries of truth and fiction shift over time and from culture to culture. If someone wanted to produce a typology of deception that would be the place to start. You could have found still more grist for your mill in it.

But more of that later. I do want to quarrel about a couple theses you defend in the book. I had a little trouble, actually, making out precisely what the

509

Copyright 1991 by JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS, INC.



510 James Hankins

argument was. Your target, I take it, is the now-canonical view (Burke, Franklin, Gilmore, Kelley)' that the roots of historical criticism in the nineteenth century are to be traced backed to the Renaissance humanists. The worship of antiquity leads to the desire to imitate antiquity; the competition among humanists (and artists) to imitate an historically-remote set of cultural models sharpens the sense of anachronism, which leads in turn to a rudimentary historical sense, and ultimately issues in a refined critical method. You argue, by contrast, that the humanists didn't invent anything new, but were merely reviving critical techniques already developed in antiquity by Hellenistic scholars. Other new "conditions of inquiry" usually brought forward as having encouraged a critical or historicist outlook-Renaissance "individualism", the printing press, the fascination with methodus-you dismiss as negligible influences on critical method. Moreover, you maintain that the globus intellectualis of the Renaissance can't be divided neatly into humanists and traditionalists: into clean, responsible, forward-looking, historically-minded critics on the one hand and myth-making, medieval Kindermenschen on the other. In fact (or am I reading this in?) Renais- sance humanists were quite as likely (more likely?) to be forgers and fantasts as their medieval brethren. You cite the (admittedly startling) cases of Erasmus's attempt to pass off his own religious politics under the name of St Cyprian, Carlo Sigonio's forgery of Cicero's Consolatio, and the spectacular case of Annius of Viterbo's Etruscan forgeries. You argue that the increased attention to and refinement of critical methods in the later Renaissance is in large part the result of increased attention to and refinement of the art of forgery. In short, you think the development of forgery and criticism in literary culture is something like the development of offensive and defensive techniques in warfare: every advance in offensive weaponry or tactics is soon matched by new defensive weapons and tactics. The Renaissance, like the Hellenistic period, was a great age of literary forgery; therefore it also became (like the Hellenistic period) a great age of criticism.

The subtext, I take it, is anti-positivist. Every advance in criticism is matched by advance in the techniques of falsification. Indeed, if I read you right, the techniques of forgery really are the same as the techniques of criticism. And humanity today is as determined to deceive and be deceived as it ever was; if the sixteenth century has its Annian forgeries and its Carlo Sigonio, the late twentieth has its Hitler diaries and its Peter Gay. Forgeries, being time-bound, reveal themselves eventually, but critics too are time-bound, and cannot help being selectively critical. I gather this is the point of your comparison of the critical technique of Porphyry, Isaac Casaubon, and Richard Reitzenstein. Criticism can and must continue, for our mental health-your comparison is to psychoanaly- sis-but the project of a thoroughly critical history is just an illusion. Limited progress in correcting past errors is possible, we may even enlarge our historical understanding of certain parts of the past, but the hope of any broader success in objectifying the past-of creating by collective effort a finished portrait or account upon whose main lines consensus can be permanently achieved-this

' P. Burke, The Renaissance Sense of the Past (New York, 1970); J. Franklin, Jean Bodin and the Sixteenth-Century Revolution in the Methodology of Law and History (New York, 1963); M. P. Gilmore, Humanists and Jurists (Cambridge, Mass., 1963); D. R. Kelley, Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship (New York, 1970).



Forging Links with the Past 511

our mutability and our differences forbid. Criticism in the twentieth century still battles the same demons of deceit and self-delusion it has always battled, and the fight, from the very nature of the human animal, is still an unequal one.

I hope I have this right. No doubt I'm reading a bit into your last chapter, since you never address the epistemological issue directly. In any case that's an issue I'd rather dodge. I think our differences on it go pretty far down, but I'm not enough of a philosopher to work them out in an interesting (or brief) way. Where I'd like to take you up is on the whole question of the historicity of criticism and the critical mind. I should say first, though, that I do think that some parts of your argument are unanswerably true (even though this means I'll have to rewrite my inspirational lecture on "The Rise of Historical Criticism"). I accept your point, for example, that Renaissance criticism, technically speaking, is largely derivative from ancient criticism. One might observe that criticism for the Renaissance humanist required a much greater exertion of historical imagination, the historical distance from his texts being greater than that of the ancient critic. Surely the great divide of Christianity and the fall of the ancient world in particular create a formidable challenge to an early modem critic trying to decide what Manilius or Virgil really wrote. But that doesn't affect your main point. I was impressed by your quotations showing that early modem critics themselves, even some early nineteenth-century critics, believed they weren't doing anything new, but merely continuing the ancient art of criticism. (But of course they would say that, wouldn't they?) Perhaps you might even one day succeed in exploding the myth of "Lorenzo Valla, Father of Criticism," that seems to make its appearance in every undergraduate lecture on the Renaissance.

I also think you are right, obviously right, that Renaissance humanists can be as mythopoeic, self-indulgent, and downright dishonest in their constructions of the past as any medieval scholar. The rest of us were blind not to have seen this more clearly. I think your view is plausible (at the least) that humanists typically counter myth with myth, and that critical techniques are as likely to be used to support falsehood and forgery as to support an open-ended inquiry into truth. I'd suggest we can even understand why this was so in political terms. Since this is a period when traditional notions of Christendom and empire are being challenged by territorial states (including the papacy), it's clear that humanists, in the service of the new powers, had the double task of attacking traditional or rival myths of empire and replacing them with new myths. Thus Annius of Viterbo criticizes with penetrating insight the canonical view that traces the roots of culture to the Greco-Roman world. But what he would put in its place, in order to glorify the home town of Viterbo, is corresponding quantities of Etruscan mummery-flummery compounded equally of fantasy and critically sophisticated lies. There is, one might say, a cultural interest in using criticism to wreck rival myths, and in using critical techniques to produce more plausible forgeries. But there is little or no cultural interest in criticizing one's own myths in the interests of "objective truth." (Not surprising, since "objectivity" wasn't invented till the nineteenth century.) So Garin's portrait of humanists as Gramscian intellectuals whose historical consciousness places them in critical opposition to hegemonic traditions is distorted. Most humanist critics (Erasmus being here, as so often, exceptional) are hired guns in a battle of competing myths and traditions. Human-



512 James Hankins

ist criticism, like rhetoric, is a weapon of total war, not the stimulant of an awakening historical consciousness.

Anyway, I'd better get around to the points of disagreement. Your nihil novum line, I think, is in danger of concealing some fundamental changes in the nature and context of historical criticism which I think took place sometime in the Late Renaissance. Oh, I can see that you've allowed for changes in "conditions of inquiry," but in the end your insistence on the continuity of critical practice relegates them to the background of the story. It may be true-probably is true- that the environment of criticism in the fifteenth and early sixteenth century is not much different from that of antiquity, but when we gei into the late Renais- sance; and a fortiori when we get into the .nineteenth century, this idea starts to look a little perverse. Leaving aside the question of results (though I think few serious people would deny that modem scholarly accounts of, say, the culture of Periclean Athens, are demonstrably far more accurate than those of the sixteenth century), it seems to me undeniable that the context and programme of modem critical scholarship are very different indeed from those of premodern critics.

The other point I found debatable was your round assertion that the forger 'above all . . . is irresponsible; however good his ends and elegant his techniques, he lies" (126). Or (46) "to infer, as some historians have done, from single cases like Nanni's the more general assertion that the flourishing of forgery reveals that early periods did not share our notion of truth and authority, is surely unjustified." Or (37) "the only reason to assume that most earlier forgers were more innocent is our own desire to explain away a disquieting feature of the past." In a way this is refreshing: I too find tiresome and absurd the requirement to judge each age "in its own terms" as though we ourselves were located in some passionless intermundia. Of course the demand for "objectivity" in our moral judgments really means abandoning moral judgments altogether. Of course we should judge other ages in our own terms; we haven't any other. Yet one would like to avoid moral anachronism. The way out, perhaps, is that useful distinction moral theologians make (or used to make) between sin and guilt. Anyone with moral sense can judge whether someone else has sinned. But only God (or in this case, the historian) can judge the degree of guilt: to what extent the sinner was predisposed to sin by ignorance, bad example, or overwhelming temptation; to what extent the virtuous are protected by good upbringing, weak desires, or strong sanctions. It still seems to me that if the character of historical consciousness, if the moral valences of historical writing, are radically different in an earlier period, we should restrain ourselves from pronouncing on the guilt, if not the sin, of the forger. Future ages might find it difficult to explain why we ostracize historians who knowingly or unknowingly repeat lies in print, but express only mild disgust, annoyance or even amusement with some of our colleagues' letters of recommen- dation.

I've been thinking more about these problems because, just before reading your Forgers, I happened to read Did the Greeks Believe in Their Myths? by Paul Veyne. The French original2 has been sitting on my shelves for seven years, but I only worked up the energy to read it when somebody sent me the new English version published by Chicago. The translation seems competent, though I found

2 Les Grecs ont-ils cru 'a leurs mythes? (Paris, 1983).




myself checking the French in the more philosophical bits as the translator uses idiosyncratic English equivalents for Veyne's technical terms. In any case, you really should read it if per miraculum you haven't; despite the title and despite Veyne's being an ancient historian, the book is, I think, as important for us as for classicists. Of course Veyne being a French intellectual exhibits the usual comic mixture of the nihilistically skeptical with the dogmatic. You will be amused by his absurdist suggestion that "perhaps we will one day discover that the Greek texts are a fully fashioned forgery perpetrated by the scholars of the sixteenth century." Less amusing are the contortions he goes through to avoid the reductio ad Hitlerum. While expressing extreme distaste for Faurisson's attack on the historicity of Auschwitz, he has to admit that "the poor man was close to his truth," that he "was speaking from the perspective of a mythical rather than historical truth." Yet Veyne's Foucauldian assumptions give us no way of privileging historical over mythical truth. Of course the book was written before the De Man affair; perhaps he'd express himself differently now.

Still, I found some of his ideas extraordinarily suggestive. Rationalist historians of thought, I suppose, tend to assume that the beliefs people hold must hang together in some way, and regard it as part of their office as historians to show how this can be the case. Veyne, being an irrationalist, likes to meditate on the inconsistencies of belief: how Ethiopians believe that the leopard respects the fasts of the Coptic Church, but still protect their livestock from him on Wednes- days and Fridays; how children believe and do not believe in Santa Claus; how a novel can make us angry or tearful though we know it is only fiction; how we can believe "the assured results of modem science" (or history), knowing full well those results are liable to be rubbished in a decade. What he sees is that the verbs "believe" and "know" are used equivocally to describe a broad range of phenomenological experiences. Or alternatively, the great variety of mental states we crudely describe as "believing" and "knowing" are the effects of equally various "programs of truth" (I'd prefer "programs of belief"), which use widely different means of inducing belief. Journalism and history, reason and authority, science and religion each have different programs which induce quantitatively and qualitatively different states of belief. Veyne even suggests that to try to maintain consistency among our beliefs is the exception rather than the rule, and requires a specific occasion (no cognitive dissonance for him). The child will not allow his belief (based on experience) that Santa Claus does not exist to trump his belief (based on authority) that he does exist so long as he doesn't have to; reality triumphs only when his shame at not being grown-up outweighs his fear that admitting the nonexistence of Santa will mean no plastic dinosaurs on Christmas morning.

So beliefs are the effects of cultural practices, and cultural practices have a history. To equivocate still further, History, as a cultural practice, has a history. According to Veyne, it has changed so much from the time of the Greeks that "history then and now is alike in name only."

Sorry to go on so about Veyne, but I think he is on to something important and relevant about the historicity of belief-states and the cultural practices which induce them. Your line in Forgers seems to be that the Whig view of criticism, "the rise and progress of historical science" and all that, is untenable-fine, I agree-but what you want to replace it with seems to be a Great Tradition of



514 James Hankins

essentially similar critical practices running from the Hellenistic period to Ger- man philology of the nineteenth century. What seems to me potentially more fruitful is to follow up Veyne's ideas about the historicity of cultural practices, to see how criticism has been changed by changes in its context and purpose. Perhaps it is actually the case that, despite using similar techniques, criticism "then and now," like history, "is alike in name only."

In fact, while I was reading Veyne, an account quite different from yours took shape in my head about the transition from traditional to modem historiography. The latter aren't Veyne's terms, by the way; he doesn't try to plug his analysis into the question of modernism at all (I suspect he'd disapprove), but he certainly provides materials for those (like myself) who are obsessed by it. I'd like to sketch it out for you and get your comments.

In this account premodern (say, pre-1600) history is, in Veyne's language, "tradition and vulgate," "a vulgate authenticated by consensus over the ages." It is not built up from sources, it does not make methodological use of (though it may perceive) the distinction between "primary and secondary sources" (or, less vulgarly, sources and authorities). It does not develop techniques of authenti- cating its sources nor does it test its authorities by systematic comparison with authentic sources and with each other. Instead, historians view it as their task to communicate, correct and complete an authoritative tradition (a "vulgate") that is regarded as fundamentally sound and truthful. "Instead of reestablishing the text, they copy or improve the accepted version." This is not to say that traditional historians are not critical. But their criticism is not based on an apriori rejection of the supernatural, the mythical, and the legendary. Instead, if philosophically inclined, they allegorize: they find the essential truth behind legendary appearances. If more historically minded, they are reductive and syncretic. The forest of tales is thinned out by removing redundancies (the tale of Orpheus and Eurydice is "the same as" the tale of Adam and Eve). Implausible overgrowths are cut back on the principle of "current things"-whatever is considered possible at the current moment-thus the tale of Medusa must "really" be about a queen taken in war, or, alternatively, about a monstrous beast found in the Sahara whose existence is attested in the works of natural historians. The idea that it is false simpliciter does not occur. The truth of tales is judged by all sorts of criteria besides the ability to verify it on the basis of authentic sources or experience: it should be true if edifying, morally sound, or (in the Christian period) theologically correct.

(I suspect, by the way, that the tendency of pre-modern historians to regard the supernatural, legendary and mythical as inexact versions of the truth rather than simple falsehoods has something to do with ancient psychological doctrine, which regards the soul as having a power to intuit to a greater or lesser extent a reality behind appearances, as a distinct from the modem view of cognition as the creating of mental representations of reality. But it would take some effort to work this all out.)

In any case, the program of modern historiography is organized on quite different hermeneutical principles, and these principles resemble closely certain other principles that first appear in the course of the general revolution in Western thought during the early modern period. In the first place, as Veyne says, "popular credulity is culturally devalued." Pre-modern historians smile at popular versions




of myths and legends but assume that, being part of Tradition, they offer truths to those of better mind; modem historians simply scrap all myths as unreliable. (Veyne says [59], "Fontenelle was doubtless the first one to say it: myths have no basis in truth and are not even allegories.") Authorities who credit the miracu- lous are dismissed as unreliable. The distinction between sources and authorities becomes fundamental to the writing of history. This is because the criterion of verification comes to be privileged over other considerations (moral and theologi- cal) in establishing correct accounts. The traditional historian expects to be taken at his word; the modem historian makes an argument and furnishes proofs so that the reader may call his interpretation into question. The traditional historian is authoritarian; the modem historian consensual. The latter hopes that exhaus- tive presentation of his evidence and reasoning will produce agreement among qualified experts.

(I'm reminded of a passage in Bacon's Great Instauration which also brings out the parallels with the contemporary change in scientific method:

I have not sought ... nor do I seek either to force or ensnare men's judgments, but I lead them to things themselves and the concordances of things, that they may see for themselves what they have, what they can dispute, what they can add and contribute to the common stock.... I so present these things naked and open, that my errors can be marked and set aside before the mass of knowledge be further infected by them; and it will be easy also for others to continue and carry on my labours.)

The state of belief produced by the modem historian's program of truth also differs from that of the traditional historian. Traditional history (like the traditional science) produces a peculiar state of rocklike conviction about the central inherited truths of a culture combined with lightly-held beliefs about non-essentials. Modem history (like modem science) produces an even more peculiar state of "provisional beliefs': one believes that such-and-such a hypothesis best fits the evidence, and one believes that that hypothesis will inevitably be refined or replaced in light of new evidence. The commitment of modem historians, it might be said, is to a critical method, not to a particular set of descriptive truths.

The shift from traditional to modem historiography also presupposes a change in historians' deontology. Veyne makes the point that the deontology of traditional historians is like the deontology of modem journalists. They verify the sources for their stories without necessarily disclosing their sources or even believing them. By the same token, to criticize a joumalist is to apply mostly internal criteria: we detect the wrong detail, the bias, the contradiction, "we need only read him to know whether he is intelligent, impartial, or precise, and whether he has a broad cultural background. It is exactly in this way that Polybius in Book 12 judges and condemns his predecessor Timaeus." The deontology of the modem historian, on the other hand, obliges him to make his sources publici juris. And in the last century, at least, there has been (in principle) a well-defined professional code enforced by a system of peer review linking technical compe- tence and reliability to right of publication and career advancement. These, I submit, are circumstances that make modem historiography a very different animal from pre-modern. (The development of historians' deontology would make an interesting subject for someone, or has it been done?)



516 James Hankins

One could easily go on about the reasons for the change from traditional to modem historiography. Myself, I think the greatest single reason is the Reforma- tion, with the need it creates (on both sides) to invent new traditions. Of course that had happened before in Western history, most strikingly with the triumph of Christianity, but what makes the Protestant revolution different is that neither side was able to suppress the other. Unable to impose its myths by violence, each side was obliged to resort to evidence and reasoned argument. I know that sounds Whiggish. Yet Veyne himself suggests something along these lines when he distinguishes between ancient historiography, "born from inquiry," and modern, "fashioned by controversy." Not that he'd regard the transition to critical reason as necessarily an advance; as a follower of Foucault, he probably thinks of critical reason as a form of violence.

You'll now say, "But Western scholarship has always had a tradition of criticism arising from controversy. It's just that it has been hidden in the antiquar- ian rather than in the narrative tradition of history (Momigliano's point).3 Refor- mation controversy may be more intense (or at least better documented), but it's not qualitatively different than the controversy between pagan and Christian in late antiquity, or between Jewish and Greek historiography before that."

Well, all right, the change is more complicated, but Reformation controversy is surely a precondition for the new historiography. My fallback position is that this intense controversy took place in a world where all traditions-religious, scientific, geographical, and anthropological as well as historical-were being thrown into doubt and where what had been thought of as natural was increas- ingly perceived as customary, or "culturally constructed" as people say nowadays. The explosion of information brought on by printing, the spread of skepticism, the failure of religion to provide certainty, leads to an obsession with method. Historiography is drawn into this hermeneutical vortex and is changed fundamentally. It becomes "critical history." The objectification of nature as something distinct from the observing self, the world as a theatre (in the contemporary image), is matched by the objectification of the past. Instead of intuiting nature, we have to discover its laws by method acting on empirical data; instead of intuiting the truth behind historical traditions, we have to construct a past by method acting on evidence.

Before I forget, there was one other point I thought was interesting in the Veyne book. He argues not only that "programs of truth" are cultural artifacts that change their nature over time; they also occupy space in a semantic field. The description of history changes when it can be juxtaposed to the historical novel as well as to poetry. It also changes when it writes from monumenta rather than from commentarii. This is another reason why I have trouble both with your nihil novum position on criticism and your moral censure of forgers. It seems to me that criticism is one thing when it is only one weapon in the rhetorical panoply of pre-modern controversialists but something significantly different when it is the indispensable foundation of an historical edifice. It also seems to me that forgery is a different proposition entirely in a world where the ability to imitate is considered a great art, where historians are expected to invent speeches,

I A. Momigliano, The Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography, The Sather Classical Lectures, vol. 54 (Berkeley, 1990), chapter 3.




where the uses of history are very different, and where the kind of belief historians aim to create is qualitatively different from the scientistic claims of modem historiography.

What made me think of this was McCuaig's new book on Sigonio with its long discussion of the 1583 forgery of Cicero's Consolatio. For me, it's the best book on sixteenth-century intellectual history since your Scaliger I. I had started to think that Sigonio was one of those important figures that drop out of the historiography because nobody wants to do the work necessary to understand them, but McCuaig has really done it all; he's made a really thorough excavation of the manuscript and early printed sources and seems to have an extraordinary command of the historiography on sixteenth century Italian scholarship. The new material on university infighting, censorship and scholarly publishing is priceless. (I do wish he had written up the lecture-hall fights and the exchanges of pasquinades a bit more.) I also found revealing McCuaig's account of Sigonio's struggle for historical integrity amid Counter-Reformation pressures to be reli- giously correct. It gave me some clues about the mentality of the new intellectual communities of the late Renaissance which created critical historiography. I kept being reminded of the way Galileo insisted that revelation should be interpretated on the basis of scientific certainties rather than on the basis of tradition; Sigonio seemed to me to be making fundamentally the same move with regard to church history.

But anyway, the point that struck me in connection with the business about forgery's place in the "semantic field," was McCuaig's treatment of the forged Consolatio Ciceronis. His reconstruction of the affair was exemplary, of course; but despite all efforts to explain it in terms of Sigonio's prior career, I felt he couldn't quite conceal his puzzlement over the way Sigonio had "abused his own authority and scholarship." He leaves unanswered the question: what is there in common between this Sigonio, the forger, and the Sigonio of the previous chapter who fought so stubbornly against the Roman censors to keep the Donation of Constantine out of his De Occidentali Imperio? Maybe one should just throw up one's hands at the mysteries of human conduct, but it's also possible we're not reading the semantic field correctly.

It was after all a time when imitation of the classical was still thought to be the most valuable form of cultural activity. Historians still composed imaginary speeches for insertion into their narratives. Emulation of the ancients sometimes took the form of "restoring" lost works by imaginary reconstruction from fragments and testimonia. Sigonio's hero, Sadoleto, had produced just such a "restora- tion" of Cicero's lost Hortensius in 1538; when Sigonio edited the Fragmenta of Cicero in 1559, he recommended Sadoleto's oration as giving a good impression of what the original might have been like. All this McCuaig points out. But then he regretfully says that Sigonio in publishing the Consolatio without acknowledg- ing his own authorship was driven "over the boundary" into deceit and literary fraud. What I wonder is whether there really was such a boundary then. Or, if there was, whether it was freighted with the same moral taboos as we today are naturally disposed to load it with. Did contemporaries really think Sigonio had forfeited his reputation as a scholar by this deceit? Admittedly, his enemies tried to make heavy weather of it. But it looks to me as though they were aiming primarily to assimilate Sigonio's behavior to that of the infamous Ceccarelli, a



518 James Hankins

vulgar trafficker in manuscript forgeries-behavior which really was over the boundary. (This, I suspect, was why Sigonio never talked about the manuscript source of the Consolatio, despite this being an obvious thing to do to authenticate a text.) Isn't all this just good old-fashioned Renaissance invective? I looked in vain in McCuaig's documentation for condemnations of literary forgery as such. So I wonder how seriously Sigonio's neutral contemporaries took the whole thing. I suspect Sigonio himself (at least originally) may have regarded the affair as a jeu d'esprit. The inserting of genuine fragments into a contrived context is just the sort of virtuosity the age of mannerism most admired. And why would he have put chunks of Muretus's prolusions in his Consolatio if he really wanted to succeed in the imposture? Did he really think he'd hoodwink the learned of Europe, who had much of Cicero by heart, when he inserted chunks of Cicero verbatim? The sixteenth century didn't possess the genre of historical fiction, after all, and had no romantic doctrine of authorship to invest literary artifacts with unique value as the confections of genius. Perhaps in another age Sigonio would have written historical fictions like Walter Scott's, who delighted to find documentation to show his stories might have been true. In Sigonio's time (as you've said in print yourself) literary works like Cicero's philosophica were still thought to be valuable primarily as morally edifying, not as documents of literary history, or bricks in the temple of Historical Truth. Even afterwards, when Sigonio defended the Consolatio's authenticity in the Pro consolatione orationes duae, I suspect there was still an element of play. McCuaig seems to regard this further act of deception as deepening Sigonio's guilt. Sigonio, he says, "uses every technique of rhetorical distortion to carry its point"; "[the Pro consolatione] exemplifies many of the fallacies of argument outlined in Aristotle's Rhetoric 2.24." I wonder whether this wasn't intentional: did Sigonio think of the Pro consolatione as nothing more than a rhetorical showpiece? Was it really a desper- ate gamble to save his reputation, as McCuaig represents it, or was it more of a learned game? It seems to me that at least some of the letters could be read in this way. Of course Renaissance ironia is notoriously hard to detect sometimes.

Well, enough of this. I hope all your admirers don't write you such long letters. Perhaps we'll get a chance to talk again before too long so you won't have to write an answer to this screed. But I thought I'd give you my considered views while they were still fresh, since no one will ask me to review the book if Paul Grendler's rule ("books are never reviewed by the right people") holds true.

Yours as always,

Jim

Harvard University.



forging links with the past

Documents