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Manufacturing a Past for the Present contains a series of essays on forgeries and manipulated texts and objects mainly in the service of modern nations emerging during the long nineteenth century, and reflections on the related debates on authenticity.

Yue gong qi shi 越公其事 is a recently published manuscript from the Tsinghua University collection. The manuscript provides a new version of the well-known story of King Goujian of Yue 越王句踐 (r. 496–464 b.c.e.), who turned defeat into victory and overcame Yue's formidable rival, the state of Wu 吳. My exploration of this text focuses on its two most notable aspects. First, the story about the policy of self-strengthening allegedly adopted by Goujian offers new insights into the evolution of political thought in the Warring States period. Second, the text allows deeper insight into the genre of didactic historical narratives that became prominent at a certain point of time between the Springs-and-Autumns (Chunqiu 春秋, 770–453 b.c.e.) and the Warring States (Zhanguo 戰國, 453–221 b.c.e.) periods.

This short essay, prepared on the occasion of the conferral of the Distinguished Service Award of the Conference on Latin American History, uses various examples to illustrate the pleasure to be drawn from the day-to-day work of academic history. It opens with reflections on the practice of transcription, the act of bringing recognizable syllables and words out of the often baffling strokes of the pen that have left ink on paper. Although the wave of digitization has increased the sum total of material easily available to us, it is when we do the work of paleography, reducing the continuous lines of manuscript to something close to the discontinuities of type, that we find that our brains can hold on to the words and carry the interpretation forward. After transcription often comes translation, converting the formulas, idioms, and idiosyncrasies of past speech into language intelligible to our readers. As we translate, we are forced to acknowledge our own uncertainties about the meaning of texts, and to make the provisional choices that resolve ambiguity. Across both of these tasks we are nourished by collaboration, the talking and writing together that makes the study of the past into a social activity. Eager collaboration turns the practice of history into a double dialogue, with the documents and with our colleagues, engaging the mind and the spirit and bringing what can only be called joy.

Selling to strangers was a significant occupational hazard for retailers in late Georgian Britain, one that was hard to avoid. The dangers were especially great in larger towns and cities, where shopkeepers were dependent on a steady stream of passing trade composed of a large number of customers that they did not know. Though traders risked financial loss and even possible prosecution by accepting counterfeit banknotes, refusal to accept them meant losing vital custom. In areas of growing urban populations, tradesmen and women thus faced an increasingly tricky dilemma in their day-to-day business as they dealt with more strangers whose trustworthiness and personal credit were extremely hard to gauge, at a time when banknote forgery was on the rise. The decisions that retailers made about both banknotes and the individuals who presented them for payment illustrate some of the ways that town dwellers sought to navigate the rising anonymity of urban society in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. This article suggests that traders relied on a series of techniques that in previous experience usually worked: examining banknotes and those strangers who presented them with care, relying on the expertise of neighbors and members of their household, and dealing by preference with individuals who appeared to be linked to their local community. These behaviors demonstrate that “modernity” might have affected the lives and outlooks of ordinary Londoners in unexpected and contradictory ways, some strongly linked to older forms of society.

This dialogue brings together two archives: the Derek Jarman collection at Tate Britain and the Edwin Morgan manuscripts at the University of Glasgow Library Archives and Special Collections. Both Jarman and Morgan were queer artists who reforged the medieval past through visual and verbal processes, including scrapbooking, collage, and translation. The dialogue also brings together two critics, Francesca Brooks and E.K. Myerson, who have been responding to these archives through a combination of traditional scholarship and creative practice. Both in their approach to the medieval past and in their multimedia, visio-verbal practices, Jarman and Morgan’s archives are generative, fluid, and expansive spaces that invite embodied, affective, and creative responses. The dialogue explores what it means to be a medievalist working in the modern archive and how our critical approaches to the medieval subjects of our research might be changed and transformed by this work.

This article offers a critical edition of a papyrus fragment in Coptic that contains a dialogue between Jesus and his disciples in which Jesus speaks of \"my wife.\" The fragment does not provide evidence that the historical Jesus was married but concerns an early Christian debate over whether women who are wives and mothers can be disciples of Jesus. Solely for purposes of reference, the fragment is given the title \"The Gospel of Jesus's Wife.\"

Forging the Past: Invented Histories in Counter-Reformation Spain chronicles and unravels historiographical strands made of the complicated lives and afterlives of a set of manuscripts and printed books in defense of the Spanish church and its saints and martyrs against the Roman post-Tridentine reform of Christian sacred history. Olds studies one particular Jesuit historian, Jerónimo Román de la Higuera (1538-1611) and his notorious \"falsos cronicones,\" in which he rewrote and invented historical archives in order to prove the antiquity of Spanish Christianity. Olds's enticing narrative and thorough research prove the point that forgery is also a \"mode of historical writing,\" and the only reproach one might level at this fine book is the narrow focus on Spain when it comes to discussing the reception of the Chronicles. Reading this book, however, inspires and raises larger questions, including the use of forgeries for patriotic (national) histories and the ethics of historical scholarship. By looking into recent statements by Sheldon Pollock, a philologist and intellectual historian of South Asia, and by Hayden White in his recent The Practical Past, this article argues that in spite of their different methodologies, they both converge in defining the task of a historian as doing something other than supporting national, patriotic, technocratic, and \"market-oriented\" agendas.

Through an analysis of varying configurations of the persona of David in some Qumran scrolls, I argue for an approach to the study of ancient pseudepigraphy that prioritizes manuscripts over reconstructed and idealized literary works. Three data sets ground the study: three fragments from Cave 4 that contain Pss 33 and 69; 4Q522, a paraphrase of Joshua that incorporates Ps 122; and finally two groupings of 11QPsa, the Ascents collection and the material following \"David's Last Words.\" I observe how the \"I\" voice of a given psalm or group of psalms joins third-person description to constitute David's authorial persona in ways distinctive to the text inscribed on a given manuscript. Accordingly, this article aligns with studies that see the enlargement and mutability of authorial figures in the expanding archive of early Jewish literature and with more recent calls to view texts as material objects that reflect their context of production.

The impressive career of the mysterious Jewish adept and prophet Mardochaeus de Nelle is well known among specialists in Judaism and early modern science or the history of alchemy. Hailing from Italy, he was allegedly active at leading courts of the late sixteenth century—including those of Elector August in Dresden and Emperor Rudolf II in Prague—and several alchemical texts circulated under his name. Based on thorough scrutiny of all currently known sources in print and especially in manuscript, we conclude that most of them were falsely associated with De Nelle due to a case of mistaken identity and a late eighteenth century forgery. Only the oldest sources, four manuscript versions of a Paracelsus commentary, may perhaps shed light on De Nelle's biography and place him in Reichenstein (1567), Speyer (1570), and Cracow (1573). On balance, however, the internal evidence suggests that we are dealing with a case of pseudepigraphy. De Nelle's example shows why it is imperative to examine all extant manuscript versions of relevant texts and take into consideration the cultural stereotypes that inform these sources.

[...]he stated: \"What was the object of the English Mercury is not easy to settle\".12 This article seeks to answer Thomas Watts's question. First among these was the publication in 1742, in seven vast folio volumes, of the state papers of John Thurloe, secretary of state during the English Republic and Protectorate.31 After that, Birch took on the life of Robert Boyle, a substantial 458-page biography, published in Boyle's Works (1744).32 Birch was also undertaking research for Nicholas Tindal's continuation of his translation of the Huguenot historian Paul de Rapin Thoyras's History of England (1726–1731). [...]the outcome was less orthodox. Thomas Chatterton, George Steevens, and William Rufus Chetwood (not usually counted as a forger), though he determined that their handwriting and literary styles did not match.112 Only six weeks after Watts published his open letter to Panizzi, Sir Henry Ellis, Principal Librarian of the British Museum, had exposed Yorke as the author of the mercuries in a private letter, citing a match of his handwriting, which had been identified by John Cates, superintendent of the reading room.113 Cates further concluded that the manuscript emendations were by Birch, who thus was now included amongst those guilty of the forgery.