This chapter contends that forgery should be considered a form of historical writing. It presents evidence to show that, in the Middle Ages, forgeries not only frequently constituted significant parts of archives and other resources for the writing of history, but that forgeries themselves were often the products of historical research on the part of their authors. If forgeries are considered one end of a spectrum of historical writing (rather than the binary opposite of the true historical document) then a nuanced understanding of the relationships between forgeries and genres such as hagiography and the medieval chronicle becomes possible. After discussion of these relationships, the chapter concludes with an examination of the criticism of forgeries during the Middle Ages. Forgeries were often denounced; yet they could also survive denunciation, not because of a lack of critical sense on the part of medieval audiences, but because of the importance of their function as historical writing.

Dido too was an emigrant …

When the queen had heard these things, she replied to the Trojans: ‘Alight from your ships … Hear my adventures, because I too am a stranger in this province. I was born the daughter of Sidon, the King of Tyre, and when I had reached marriageable age, my father gave me, with a significant dowry, to Sycheus, a distinguished and noble man. When my father departed this world, my brother Pygmalion took over the kingdom. Plotting with his household servants to seize my husband's wealth, he killed him while on a hunt, then hid news of the death in the hope of murdering me and stealing my own money. While this was going on, the shade of my husband appeared in my dreams and told me to gather together all my possessions and flee. More, I should take with me the wealth of his grandfathers and great-grandfathers. So I did. And with a band of people gathered together in secretly assembled ships, I collected all my riches and escaped to Sicily. I intended to found the city of Syracuse there, but when I arrived the people began to complain about me. Recognising this, because I was not going to settle there, I returned to the ships with all my companions, and fled here. When I asked who the king of the province was, the answer came back: ‘Iarbas the Getulian’. So I sent ambassadors to him with the request that he might alienate some land for me so that I could settle with my companions. He gave me this land, as much as could be marked off using strips from the hide of a bull. And when I had built this city, he wanted to take me in marriage, nuptials I despised. But if your leader is such a man, and if we turn out to be to his liking, perhaps – as I said before – nuptials won't displease him.

THERE IS A MAP OF THE WORLD in many medieval manuscripts of Gaius Sallustius Crispus's Bellum Iugurthinum (The War with Jugurtha), a short, polemical account of Rome's war with the upstart Numidian ruler Jugurtha in 112–105 Bc.

We must begin with names. ‘Tony Edwards’ is the person to whom this volume is dedicated, but it is not a name that everyone will immediately recognize, particularly those who know him only from his published work, for he has made himself known in public, from the first, as A. S. G. Edwards. When he began his career, this was the manner in which most scholars, most men at least, named themselves. Fashions have changed, and given names, one, two, or more, are now almost universal. But Tony has held on tenaciously to his initials, perhaps because he has three of them. We do not believe that he did so in any spirit of emulation of or desire to align himself with ‘Edwards A. S. G.’, the Edwards Active Strain Gauge well known to Google, an advanced form of technical engineering equipment which guarantees the vacuum conditions needed for the manufacture of certain precision instruments, such as aircraft engine turbine blades. It seems strangely apt as an analogous form of ‘A. S. G.’, whether one thinks of the ‘active strain’ involved as what he exerts upon himself or upon other people. The analogy fails, of course, when one comes to the creation of vacuum, where it works back to front, for Tony's work has essentially been to fill the vacuum that once existed in the study of manuscript history.

The Granarium of John Whethamstede ranks amongst the more ambitious intellectual undertakings of English monastic culture in the later Middle Ages. In the Granarium, Whethamstede, abbot of St Albans from 1420 to 1440, and again from 1452 until h s death in 1465, compiled over 1,500 entries on a very wide range of topics, primarily of relevance to ecclesiastical and classical history, arranged alphabetically, and distributed across four parts. This ‘granary’ – the term is a pun on Whethamstede's name (‘in loco frumenti’), but also a serious conceptualization of the reference work as a store of knowledge – drew on numerous sources. While the most important of these, such as Martinus Polonus’ Chronicon, Paulus Orosius’ Historiae, Valerius Maximus’ Facta et dicta memorabilia, or Ovid's Metamorphoses, are unsurprising, Whethamstede also made use of more obscure and more recent texts, such as the Dialogus inter Orthodoxumet Catechuminum attributed to Michael Pelagallo, or Andrea Fiocchi's De magistratibus Romanorum. Whethamstede had attended the council of Pavia in 1423 and remained deeply interested in conciliar debates; part one of the Granarium contains lengthy entries related to events at the Council of Constance (1414–18), and makes reference to the Council of Basel (1431-49). Whethamstede was also familiar with Italian humanist culture: Petrarch, Boccaccio and Leonardo Bruni all feature amongst his sources, while Boccaccio's Genealogiae deorum gentilium seems to have been a particular influence on part four of the Granarium. This monument to the resources available at a great house such as St Albans was not intended for purely local consumption.

Historical and political writing are related – at times identical – concepts, but ones that have enjoyed different trajectories in medieval and post-medieval literatures. While strong traditions of historiography were inherited from classical antiquity and refined and altered in various ways during the Middle Ages, the category of ‘political writing’ is largely a modern scholarly invention. Evidently, medieval political writing existed, as did a sense of the political, but it is not clear that it was recognised by medieval authors or readers as a distinct literary genre. (There is, for example, no equivalent to the term ‘historia’ to describe a work of political commentary or theory). In considering fifteenth-century historical and political verse, then, we are confronted with certain asymmetries. Historical verse comprises a sprawling, diverse corpus extending generically across many different forms of writing, and in its temporal scope from creation to the present. Political verse is at once more focused on contemporary or near-contemporary matters, but also, in many of its articulations, deeply interested in exemplarity – in searching out, that is, political matters from the historical record for the purposes of edifying the present. Given the somewhat diffuse and overlapping nature of both concepts, a rigid demarcation of their boundaries seems counterproductive. Instead, in this chapter, I will pay particular attention to moments at which historical and political verse intersected: to the intrusion of political commentary into historical narrative, to political verse as a form of contemporary history, and to history as a source of authority for political writing.