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In “The History of Fake News From the Flood to the Apocalypse,” the course Earle Havens teaches at Johns Hopkins University, he presents undergrads with a formidable challenge. They have to create historical forgeries and then defend the authenticity of their deceptions.
Forgeries, hoaxes, and other types of literary fakery have preoccupied Havens, a rare books and manuscripts curator at the university’s Stern Center for the History of the Book, for many years now. As part of his curatorial brief, Havens oversees the Bibliotheca Fictiva Collection of Literary and Historical Forgery, available via JSTOR. It includes more than 2,000 items—rare books, manuscripts, and ephemera—and was the brainchild of Arthur and Janet Freeman, who amassed most of its holdings over a period of some fifty years. Johns Hopkins acquired the majority of the collection from the Freemans in 2011; it has continued to expand in the years since.
Havens spoke with JSTOR Daily about what he finds so thoroughly bewitching about the grand, long tradition of literary forgery.
JSTOR Daily: What is the Bibliotheca Fictiva collection?
Earle Havens: It’s a rare book collection that chronicles the history of literary forgery, including historical as well as imaginative literature, beginning with Old Testament pseudepigrapha and apocrypha all the way up to the middle of the twentieth century. We’ve likely been lying to each other ever since we learned how to speak. It includes physical forgeries, like medieval charters that were forged in the Middle Ages. We also have a “medieval” charter actually forged in the nineteenth century. We also have hundreds of texts that help to reveal and demolish forgeries across the millennia—documenting many of the people who wrote against things that they thought were not correct.
We have faked historical bindings, fake manuscripts, and fake letters by famous people like the Protestant Reformer Martin Luther. We have books about impostors from the Middle Ages to the modern era as well as hoaxes and archaeological forgeries. We don’t do art forgery—that’s another world—but we do have a couple of painted bindings that are forged. We have a few examples of the otherwise mysterious “Spanish forger,” who was probably actually French and active around 1900, forging medieval illuminations on actual medieval vellum and wood panels.
Ours is the biggest collection in the world by a country mile on this subject, and it’s brilliant because it gets at the heart of what we do in the university every day: Get people to ask hard questions about everything and not to trust anything on its face.
When I first taught my graduate seminar on this, one of my students said, “Oh no, I can’t trust anything I read anymore,” and I replied, “Mission accomplished!”
This collection owes its existence to Arthur and Janet Freeman. What can you tell us about them?
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