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Page 186
the belief to be transmitting the "true" message). In the bookstore of the Museum of the City of New York is sold a facsimile of the bill of sale of Manhattan. In order to make it seem really old, it is scented with Old Spice. But this Manhattan purchase contract, penned in pseudo-antique characters, is in English, whereas the original was in Dutch.
4.3. Forgery Ex-Nihilo
Let us rank under this heading (i) works made à la manière de . . . , (ii) apocrypha and pseudepigrapha, and (iii) creative forgery. 6
We must assume (by temporarily suspending any ontological commitment; see section 4.1) that Oa does not existor, if according to uncertain report it existed in the past, it is by now irremediably lost. The Claimant claimsin good or bad faiththat Ob is identical with Oa. In other words, the Claimant falsely attributes Ob to a given author. In order to make this false attribution credible, one must know of a set a of different objects (Oa1, Oa2, Oa3 . . . ) all produced by an author A who is famous and well regarded. From the whole set a can be derived an abstract type, which does not take into account all the features of the individual members of a but, rather, displays a sort of generative rule and is assumed to be the description of the way in which A produced every member of a (style, type of material used, and so on). Since Ob looks as if it has been produced according to this type, it is then claimed that Ob is a previously unknown product of A. When such an imitation ex-nihilo is openly admitted to be sofrequently as homage or parodyone speaks of a work made à la manière de. . . .
4.3.1. Diplomatic Forgery
In this case the Claimant coincides with author B, and there are two possibilities: (i) the Claimant knows that Oa never existed; (ii) the Claimant believes in good faith that Oa existed but knows that it is irremediably lost. In both cases, the Claimant knows that Ob is a brandnew production, but he or she thinks that Ob can fulfill all the functions performed by Oa, and consequently presents Ob as if it were the authentic Oa.
Whereas a historical forgery refers to a formally authentic charter, which contains false or invented information (as with an authentic confirmation of a false privilege), the diplomatic forgery offers a false confirmation of supposedly authentic privileges. Examples of this are the forged charters produced by medieval monks who wished to antedate the property claims of their monastery. We can assume that they did so because they strongly believed that their monastery had once genuinely

 
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