#forgeries

Fake Turners from the British Museum collection.

Medieval history is full of secrets—and some of its most influential documents were outright fakes. From forged royal charters to fabricated letters from mythical kings, here are 10 famous forgeries that reshaped the Middle Ages.

What did the Bible originally say?

"It is one thing to say that the originals were inspired, but the reality is that we don't have the originals - so saying they were inspired doesn't help me much, unless I can reconstruct the originals."

"Not only do we not have the originals, we don't have the first copies of the originals. We don't even have copies of the copies of the originals, or copies of the copies of the copies of the originals. What we have are copies made later - much later. In most instances, they are copies made many centuries later. And these copies all differ from one another, in many thousands of places."

‘From the supposed library of Masterre Wyllyamme Shakespeare’ 

William Henry Ireland’s Shakespeare signature: MS. Douce e. 8, fol. 1v 

William Henry Ireland (1775–1835) curried favour with his father Samuel Ireland, an engraver, by giving him Shakespearean autographs to publish. He produced contracts, letters, marginalia, and even a new play, Vortigern. Francis Douce (1757–1834) noted that Ireland made his papers look genuine by also producing transcripts himself, ‘as it was impossible that any one except the impudent fabricator of the Shakespeare papers could read the hand writing of them’. 

But beginning in the 1950s, more than 100 fragments from 11 different parchment scrolls of the Book of Enoch, written largely in Aramaic, were found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. A few fragments were relatively large—15 to 20 lines of text—but most were much smaller, ranging in size from a piece of toast to a postage stamp. Someone had to transcribe, translate and annotate all this “Enochic” material—and Langlois’ teacher volunteered him. That’s how he became one of just two students in Paris learning Ge’ez.

Langlois quickly grasped the numerous parallels between Enoch and other books of the New Testament; for instance, Enoch mentions a messiah called the “son of man” who will preside over the Final Judgement. Indeed, some scholars believe Enoch was a major influence on early Christianity, and Langlois had every intention to conduct that type of historical research.

He started by transcribing the text from two small Enoch fragments, but age had made parts of it hard to read; some sections were missing entirely. In the past, scholars had tried to reconstruct missing words and identify where in the larger text these pieces belonged. But after working out his own readings, Langlois noticed the fragments seemed to come from parts of the book that were different from those specified by earlier scholars. He also wondered if their proposed readings could even fit on the fragments they purportedly came from. But how could he tell for sure?

To faithfully reconstruct the text of Enoch, he needed digital images of the scrolls—images that were crisper and more detailed than the printed copies inside the books he was relying on. That was how, in 2004, he found himself traipsing around Paris, searching for a specialized microfiche scanner to upload images to his laptop. Having done that (and lacking cash to buy Photoshop), he downloaded an open-source knockoff.

First, he individually outlined, isolated and reproduced each letter on Fragment 1 and Fragment 2, so he could move them around his screen like alphabet refrigerator magnets, to test different configurations and to create an “alphabet library” for systematic analysis of the script. Next, he began to study the handwriting. Which stroke of a given letter was inscribed first? Did the scribe lift his pen, or did he write multiple parts of a letter in a continuous gesture? Was the stroke thick or thin?

Then Langlois started filling in the blanks. Using the letters he’d collected, he tested the reconstructions proposed by scholars over the preceding decades. Yet large holes remained in the text, or words were too big to fit in the available space. The “text” of the Book of Enoch as it was widely known, in other words, was in many cases mistaken.

Take the story of a group of fallen angels who descend to earth to seduce beautiful women. Using his new technique, Langlois discovered that earlier scholars had gotten the names of some of the angels wrong, and so had not realized the names were derived from Canaanite gods worshipped in the second millennium B.C.—a clear example of the way scriptural authors integrated elements of the cultures that surrounded them into their theologies. “I didn’t consider myself a scholar,” Langlois told me. “I was just a student wondering how we could benefit from these technologies.” Eventually, Langlois wrote a 600-page book that applied his technique to the oldest known scroll of Enoch, making more than 100 “improvements,” as he calls them, to prior readings.

His next book, even more ambitious, detailed his analysis of Dead Sea Scrolls fragments containing snippets of text from the biblical Book of Joshua. From these fragments he concluded that there must be a lost version of Joshua, previously unknown to scholars and extant only in a small number of surviving fragments. Since there are thousands of authentic Dead Sea Scrolls, it appears that much still remains to be learned about the origins of early biblical texts. “Even the void is full of information,” Langlois told me.

Lower half of a one-page manuscript falsely attributed to Galileo Galilei. Allegedly, the document includes a draft letter to the Doge of Venice (1609) and Galileo's telescopic observations of the moons of Jupiter from January 7 to January 15, 1610.

Allegedly, the document includes a draft letter to the Doge of Venice (1609) and Galileo's telescopic observations of the moons of Jupiter from January 7 to January 15, 1610.

We are pleased to invite you to a panel regarding the discovery of the forgery of our Galileo manuscript October 6 at 7p. Hosted by the U-M Detroit Observatory in Ann Arbor, Nick Wilding (Georgia State University) and Pablo Alvarez (University of Michigan Library) will be discussing various aspects surrounding this extraordinary document, including its alleged historical significance, the fascinating process establishing it as a 20th-century fake, and the lessons that we can all learn from the unmasking of this forgery. 

Register to attend in person at the Detroit Observatory (1398 East Ann Street, entrance on Observatory St.), or register to attend virtually. 

We hope you’ll be able to join us