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received such confirmations. Medieval authors privileged tradition over documents and had a different notion of authenticity. The only form of credible document they possessed was the traditional notice itself. They could only rely on the testimony of the past, and this past had only vague chronological coordinates. Le Goff (1964:397402) has observed that the form taken by medieval knowledge is that of folklore: "La preuve de vérité, à l'époque féodale, c'est l'existence 'de toute éternité.' "Le Goff adduces a legal dispute of 1252 between the serfs of the chapter of Notre Dame de Paris in Orly and the canons. The canons based their claim to the payment of tithes on the fact that Fama proved it; the oldest inhabitant of the region was questioned on the subject and he replied that it had been so "a tempore a quo non extat memoria." Another witness, the archdeacon John, said that he had seen old charters in the chapter house which confirmed the custom, and that the canons regarded these charters as authentic because of their script. No one thought it necessary to prove the existence of these charters, let alone investigate their contents; the report that they had existed for centuries was sufficient. In such a culture it was considered perfectly fair to provide a fake document in order to testify a "true'' tradition. |
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4.3.2. Deliberate Ex-Nihilo Forgery, |
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The Claimant knows that Oa does not exist. If the Claimant coincides with the author B, then the Claimant knows that Ob is of recent manufacture. In any case the Claimant cannot believe that Oa and Ob are the same. Nevertheless, the Claimant claims, fully aware that he or she is not entitled to do so, that the two objectsone real and one imaginaryare identical or that Ob is genuine, and does so with the intention to deceive. This is the case with modern charter forgeries, with many fake paintings (see the fake Vermeer painted in this century by van Meegeren), with forged family trees intended to demonstrate an otherwise unprovable genealogy, and with deliberately produced apocryphal writings (such as Hitler's diaries).
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It is also the case of the thirteenth-century poem De vetula, which was immediately ascribed to Ovid. One may suppose that the persons who brought the Corpus Dionysianum into circulation in the ninth century and ascribed it to a pupil of Saint Paul were well aware that the work was composed much later; nevertheless, they decided to credit it to an unquestionable authority. Slightly similar to the case listed in section 4.1.3 is the phenomenon of authorial stylistic forgeries, as when a painter, famous for his works of the twenties, paints in the fifties a work which looks like an unheard-of masterpiece of the early period. |
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