The mechanical miracle was always man-made, but manufacturing the marvellous always exceeded epistemological boundaries and thus attested to divine interference and presence. The delicate balance between these elements was not always easy to maintain, and the relation between technology and the gods came under critical examination, especially in the intense religious choice and competition of the Imperial period. The issue of religious forgery through technological means is central to Lucian’s Alexander and forms the focus of Chapter 7. The Alexander demonstrates the various ways that technical knowledge is integral to the act of miracle-making. turning the text, in spite of its satiric self, into a manual for these very same purposes. A comparison with Hippolytus’ Refutation of All Heresies not only attests to the broader use of technological miracles in ancient contexts, but also exemplifies how technology could be configured differently within a religion’s theological truths.

The Epilogue draws together the various threads of the book by evaluating the pseudo-Ovidian De vetula, a thirteenth-century forgery of Ovid which claims to be written by Ovid in exile. The Epilogue asks whether, in the light of this book’s previous chapters, De vetula constitutes an ‘authentically exilic Ovid’. Menmuir shows that Ovidian exile facilitates the forgery of De vetula, underpinning its very existence and authenticating an array of blatantly medieval features as genuinely Ovidian. However, having used Ovid’s exile and his exile poetry as a springboard, the poem subsequently departs from Ovid in exile, framing the Ovid of the last book of the poem as a thirteenth-century scholar and a budding Christian to boot. Each chapter of the book is relevant to this fraudulent Ovidian transformation. De vetula is framed as the first response to both Ovid’s exile and his exile poetry, fictitiously bridging the gap between Ovid’s responses (discussed in Chapter 1) and the scholarly and literary responses covered in Chapters 2 and 3. As a forgery of Ovidian exile, the author ‘becomes the exile’ but pushes the second part of this book to extremes by replacing the genuine Ovid’s exilic poetry and life.

This chapter focuses attention on covert or unattributable propaganda conducted in India by the Foreign Office’s Information Research Department. Between the outbreak of the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, and the Indian general election of 1967, IRD operations in the subcontinent peaked. At the time, the Indian government welcomed British support in an information war waged against Communist China. However, cooperation between London and New Delhi quickly waned. Britain’s propaganda initiative in India lacked strategic coherence and cut across the grain of local resistance to anti-Soviet material. The British Government found itself running two separate propaganda campaigns in the subcontinent: one openly focused on Communist China; and a second, secret programme, targeting the Soviet Union. Whitehall found it difficult to implement an integrated and effective anti-communist propaganda offensive in India. The chapter also recovers the importance of nonaligned nations in the story of Cold War covert propaganda and reveals that India was never a passive player in the propaganda Cold War.

Chapter 1 uses the Middle English Charters of Christ to outline a medieval theory of money as debt. The charter lyrics pretend to be deeds, grants, or writs by which Christ cancels the debt owed to God by sinners, or, alternatively, bequeaths the kingdom of heaven to the faithful. In exchange for the remission or the inheritance, the charter stipulates that humankind owes a “rent” to Christ of love and the regular observance of the sacrament of penance. The form of the charter lyrics imitates the form of legal documents, using the verbal formulae and visual markers designed to ensure legal and documentary authenticity as a kind of spiritual guarantee: the lyrics are sincere forgeries. I argue that the kind of belief at work in this act of forgery is a monetary belief. The lyrics function as close analogues to money in that they measure debt and depend for their value on the creditor’s right to repayment. At the same time, like money, they depend for their operation on the community’s active willingness to participate in a shared fiction.

Recent historians usually see Home Secretary Robert Peel as a committed opponent of real criminal law reforms, content to hang large numbers of people. He did indeed enter office determined to diffuse reform momentum in parliament and succeeded in doing so, but only for a time. In fact, in pursuing the two reforms that William Paley deemed crucial to relinquishing the “Bloody Code” – preventive policing and more deterrent secondary punishments – Peel behaved like someone who believed his concessions might not hold back the tide of urbane public opinion for long. This was also apparent in his alterations to sentencing practices at assizes and his increasingly careful attention to execution levels in London. Even his consolidation measures were of more genuinely humane consequence than is usually recognized. Indeed, so adaptable to urbane opinion did Peel seem to his older, more determinedly conservative colleagues that by 1830 he inspired their distrust.

Following his return from Brazil to the Iberian Peninsula and then his journey to Rome, Nogueira continued to experience displacement while always looking for an opportunity to settle down. Upon arrival in Rome, he encountered a global city within which knowledge functioned as a currency to access patronage. In this highly competitive environment, populated by many other mercenaries of knowledge, Nogueira sought support across the city while trying his luck in other places such as the English monarchy. Aware of the difficulty of making a living in Rome, Nogueira followed a new patron to Bologna. There, he familiarized himself with the politics of the papal states in northern Italy, learned from the intense intellectual life around the university, and became involved in political negotiations between papal authorities, the Republic of Venice, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In the midst of these negotiations, he put his historical expertise to work by getting involved in an episode of forged Etruscan archaeology connected to rivalries between the Medici and Barberini families. As a ghostwriter for one of the reports concerning this forgery, he made a case for himself as someone who could serve back in Rome in a multitude of capacities, including legal courts and libraries.

Chapter 1 elucidates Bacchides’ interface between communicative media, arguing that it exemplifies how modes of correspondence work in the Plautine universe, and investigates the kinetic force of communication by proxy within the plot. It also considers the textual ruse devised by Chrysalus, with special attention to the dictation-cum-scheming scene at Bacch. 714-60. This onstage portrayal of epistolary composition is an unicum both amongst the Plautine letter plays and across classical literature in that it provides a rare glimpse of letter writing in action. The scene of writing is also rich with metatheatrical and metapoetic imagery, illustrating a main premise of this book, viz. that writing in Plautus is a source of creativity and comic power inside the play that reflects the playwright’s poetic enterprise outside of it.

This chapter analyzes the abundant sources that record accusations of violence and other abuses committed by advocates in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. While much of this evidence includes rhetorical flourishes that suggest advocates were barbaric tyrants, a close reading of the sources demonstrates that many advocates employed specific strategies to benefit in corrupt ways from their positions. These included abusing their judicial authority, making excessive demands for protection payments from churches’ dependents and treating ecclesiastical estates like their own property. This chapter also tracks disputes between monasteries and advocates that lasted multiple generations, in order to argue that advocates’ corrupt practices were deeply rooted in the challenges churches were continuously confronted with when they needed to grant someone else access to their property in order for that person to provide protection and exercise justice.

This chapter offers a case study of a single dispute over a church advocacy. In 1225, members of the entourage of Count Frederick of Isenberg attacked and killed Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne. Sources written at the time all agree that the reason for this assassination was a dispute between the count and the archbishop over the advocacy for the convent of Essen. Count Frederick had inherited the advocacy and considered it an important source of income and prestige, but Archbishop Engelbert – in whose archdiocese Essen was located – also sought control of the advocacy. The conflict between them ties together many of the themes of the preceding four chapters, including the issues of advocatial violence, forgery, royal and papal intervention in disputes and the importance of the profits accrued from holding an advocacy.

This chapter argues that monasteries and churches employed a variety of different strategies to try to counter advocates’ corrupt practices. One of the most popular was forging documents (especially royal privileges) in an effort to alter the terms of their relationships with their advocates. Many ecclesiastics also traveled to the German imperial court or the Papal See in Rome to seek outside support and to request that the ruler or pope remove advocates from their local positions. Requests to the papacy were backed by a growing body of canon law dedicated to the issue of church advocacy. Nevertheless, these strategies were frequently unsuccessful. By the early thirteenth century, it therefore became increasingly common for monasteries and churches to offer their advocates monetary payments in return for those advocates relinquishing all of their rights.

Analyzes how the Museum of the Bible mobilizes ancient artifacts in its presentation of the history of the Bible as a material object. The museum’s exhibits employ protective strategies that work to preserve its bible as a divine word from God that is easily accessible, providing a usable past for white evangelical aspirations of their own authority and supremacy. The museum’s bible is thereby made doubly reliable, in its textual form and in the integrity of its content.

Between 1797 and 1815, Britain and France each developed modern central banks, albeit in very different forms. The Bank of England’s powers expanded enormously after the suspension of gold convertibility in 1797, and it also developed a vast system of investigation and prosecution of forgery and counterfeiting, whose records form the evidentiary core of the chapter. The Bank used its powers to protect itself, but also to aid in broader English governance, helping to produce a modern money-using financial public. As with the aftermath of 1720, the Bank’s powers produced widespread political condemnation, especially accusations of illegitimate elite conspiracy. In France, the brief chaos of free banking was replaced by the centralized Bank of France, mostly under government control and with limited policy discretion. In both cases, impunity was institutionalized as a function of governance, delegated to a private bank with political obligations. These new institutions, exercising new forms of monetary policy, would reconstitute the operation of international financial system after 1815.

This chapter examines ten or so English language or bilingual documents obtained, produced, copied, adapted and forged at Christ Church Canterbury between the 1090s and the mid 1150s. Beginning with a remarkable series of bilingual writs issued by Henry I and his successors, it also analyses a purported bilingual notification of Cnut, apparently confected around 1100, and a remarkable English-language version of a diploma of Cnut, relating to the port of Sandwich, produced at approximately the same time, as well as a document of Æthelred contrived from it fifty years later. Consideration of the documents suggests this activity involved monks, both English and French, who felt the use of English made their contentious claims more plausible. In the hundred years after the Norman Conquest, these men continued, and even expanded, the range of ways in which English could be used as a language of documentary record.

In an era with no established copyright law, very limited printing with type, and surrounded by handwritten volumes, how did one determine if a written work was authentic or a forgery? How did one talk about books? This chapter answers these questions by highlighting two thinkers, Angelo Decembrio and Angelo Poliziano. Decembrio wrote a dialogue, On Literary Polish. In it, his interlocutors discuss how to stock a library. As part of that conversation, the question arises of how to tell if a book is forged. Modern readers gain an unparalleled look into how Renaissance thinkers discussed manuscripts, what value they placed on tradition, and how correct judgments about literary authenticity often lived right next to those we now deem incorrect. Poliziano came to maturity at a time when most of what we now possess of ancient Greco-Roman literature had come to light. Confronting this mountain of newly available texts and with trial and error, he developed techniques that have become part of modern ways of editing and reading texts. Elsewhere he gives us testimony of how the vocabulary surrounding books developed, even as he stands as a signal figure in the history of philology.

This chapter addresses the work of Jean Mabillon and Jean Hardouin. Mabillon, a Benedictine scholar, created a new field, paleography (the field that teaches how to date and authenticate handwritten texts) with the publication in 1681 of his On Diplomatics. Defending the authenticity of the documents he and his order were charged with curating, Mabillon set out criteria for determining authenticity. The handwriting in question, the location where the manuscript was produced, and dating formulas: these aspects and more came into play. The book succeeded, not least because Mabillon published exact replicas of the documents in question. Printing had evolved into a tool that could build trust in books as truth-bearing instruments. By contrast, Jean Hardouin came to create a wild conspiracy theory: that all of ancient literature save for a few authors was forged, as were the records of the Church Councils and even the work of Church Fathers like Saint Augustine. All of it was invented – in Hardouin’s view – by medieval theologians seeking to give themselves a backstory for their logic-chopping, sometimes heretical work. How could one know? Hardouin claimed that printing was the cause: now that so many books were printed and easily available, it was easier to compare them and thus easier to “prove” forgery.

In an era with no established copyright law, very limited printing with type, and surrounded by handwritten volumes, how did one determine if a written work was authentic or a forgery? How did one talk about books? This chapter answers these questions by highlighting two thinkers, Angelo Decembrio and Angelo Poliziano. Decembrio wrote a dialogue, On Literary Polish. In it, his interlocutors discuss how to stock a library. As part of that conversation, the question arises of how to tell if a book is forged. Modern readers gain an unparalleled look into how Renaissance thinkers discussed manuscripts, what value they placed on tradition, and how correct judgments about literary authenticity often lived right next to those we now deem incorrect. Poliziano came to maturity at a time when most of what we now possess of ancient Greco-Roman literature had come to light. Confronting this mountain of newly available texts and with trial and error, he developed techniques that have become part of modern ways of editing and reading texts. Elsewhere he gives us testimony of how the vocabulary surrounding books developed, even as he stands as a signal figure in the history of philology.