Following his return from Brazil to the Iberian Peninsula and then his journey to Rome, Nogueira continued to experience displacement while always looking for an opportunity to settle down. Upon arrival in Rome, he encountered a global city within which knowledge functioned as a currency to access patronage. In this highly competitive environment, populated by many other mercenaries of knowledge, Nogueira sought support across the city while trying his luck in other places such as the English monarchy. Aware of the difficulty of making a living in Rome, Nogueira followed a new patron to Bologna. There, he familiarized himself with the politics of the papal states in northern Italy, learned from the intense intellectual life around the university, and became involved in political negotiations between papal authorities, the Republic of Venice, and the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. In the midst of these negotiations, he put his historical expertise to work by getting involved in an episode of forged Etruscan archaeology connected to rivalries between the Medici and Barberini families. As a ghostwriter for one of the reports concerning this forgery, he made a case for himself as someone who could serve back in Rome in a multitude of capacities, including legal courts and libraries.

Chapter 1 elucidates Bacchides’ interface between communicative media, arguing that it exemplifies how modes of correspondence work in the Plautine universe, and investigates the kinetic force of communication by proxy within the plot. It also considers the textual ruse devised by Chrysalus, with special attention to the dictation-cum-scheming scene at Bacch. 714-60. This onstage portrayal of epistolary composition is an unicum both amongst the Plautine letter plays and across classical literature in that it provides a rare glimpse of letter writing in action. The scene of writing is also rich with metatheatrical and metapoetic imagery, illustrating a main premise of this book, viz. that writing in Plautus is a source of creativity and comic power inside the play that reflects the playwright’s poetic enterprise outside of it.

This chapter analyzes the abundant sources that record accusations of violence and other abuses committed by advocates in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. While much of this evidence includes rhetorical flourishes that suggest advocates were barbaric tyrants, a close reading of the sources demonstrates that many advocates employed specific strategies to benefit in corrupt ways from their positions. These included abusing their judicial authority, making excessive demands for protection payments from churches’ dependents and treating ecclesiastical estates like their own property. This chapter also tracks disputes between monasteries and advocates that lasted multiple generations, in order to argue that advocates’ corrupt practices were deeply rooted in the challenges churches were continuously confronted with when they needed to grant someone else access to their property in order for that person to provide protection and exercise justice.

This chapter offers a case study of a single dispute over a church advocacy. In 1225, members of the entourage of Count Frederick of Isenberg attacked and killed Archbishop Engelbert of Cologne. Sources written at the time all agree that the reason for this assassination was a dispute between the count and the archbishop over the advocacy for the convent of Essen. Count Frederick had inherited the advocacy and considered it an important source of income and prestige, but Archbishop Engelbert – in whose archdiocese Essen was located – also sought control of the advocacy. The conflict between them ties together many of the themes of the preceding four chapters, including the issues of advocatial violence, forgery, royal and papal intervention in disputes and the importance of the profits accrued from holding an advocacy.

This chapter argues that monasteries and churches employed a variety of different strategies to try to counter advocates’ corrupt practices. One of the most popular was forging documents (especially royal privileges) in an effort to alter the terms of their relationships with their advocates. Many ecclesiastics also traveled to the German imperial court or the Papal See in Rome to seek outside support and to request that the ruler or pope remove advocates from their local positions. Requests to the papacy were backed by a growing body of canon law dedicated to the issue of church advocacy. Nevertheless, these strategies were frequently unsuccessful. By the early thirteenth century, it therefore became increasingly common for monasteries and churches to offer their advocates monetary payments in return for those advocates relinquishing all of their rights.

Analyzes how the Museum of the Bible mobilizes ancient artifacts in its presentation of the history of the Bible as a material object. The museum’s exhibits employ protective strategies that work to preserve its bible as a divine word from God that is easily accessible, providing a usable past for white evangelical aspirations of their own authority and supremacy. The museum’s bible is thereby made doubly reliable, in its textual form and in the integrity of its content.

Between 1797 and 1815, Britain and France each developed modern central banks, albeit in very different forms. The Bank of England’s powers expanded enormously after the suspension of gold convertibility in 1797, and it also developed a vast system of investigation and prosecution of forgery and counterfeiting, whose records form the evidentiary core of the chapter. The Bank used its powers to protect itself, but also to aid in broader English governance, helping to produce a modern money-using financial public. As with the aftermath of 1720, the Bank’s powers produced widespread political condemnation, especially accusations of illegitimate elite conspiracy. In France, the brief chaos of free banking was replaced by the centralized Bank of France, mostly under government control and with limited policy discretion. In both cases, impunity was institutionalized as a function of governance, delegated to a private bank with political obligations. These new institutions, exercising new forms of monetary policy, would reconstitute the operation of international financial system after 1815.

This chapter examines ten or so English language or bilingual documents obtained, produced, copied, adapted and forged at Christ Church Canterbury between the 1090s and the mid 1150s. Beginning with a remarkable series of bilingual writs issued by Henry I and his successors, it also analyses a purported bilingual notification of Cnut, apparently confected around 1100, and a remarkable English-language version of a diploma of Cnut, relating to the port of Sandwich, produced at approximately the same time, as well as a document of Æthelred contrived from it fifty years later. Consideration of the documents suggests this activity involved monks, both English and French, who felt the use of English made their contentious claims more plausible. In the hundred years after the Norman Conquest, these men continued, and even expanded, the range of ways in which English could be used as a language of documentary record.

In an era with no established copyright law, very limited printing with type, and surrounded by handwritten volumes, how did one determine if a written work was authentic or a forgery? How did one talk about books? This chapter answers these questions by highlighting two thinkers, Angelo Decembrio and Angelo Poliziano. Decembrio wrote a dialogue, On Literary Polish. In it, his interlocutors discuss how to stock a library. As part of that conversation, the question arises of how to tell if a book is forged. Modern readers gain an unparalleled look into how Renaissance thinkers discussed manuscripts, what value they placed on tradition, and how correct judgments about literary authenticity often lived right next to those we now deem incorrect. Poliziano came to maturity at a time when most of what we now possess of ancient Greco-Roman literature had come to light. Confronting this mountain of newly available texts and with trial and error, he developed techniques that have become part of modern ways of editing and reading texts. Elsewhere he gives us testimony of how the vocabulary surrounding books developed, even as he stands as a signal figure in the history of philology.

This chapter addresses the work of Jean Mabillon and Jean Hardouin. Mabillon, a Benedictine scholar, created a new field, paleography (the field that teaches how to date and authenticate handwritten texts) with the publication in 1681 of his On Diplomatics. Defending the authenticity of the documents he and his order were charged with curating, Mabillon set out criteria for determining authenticity. The handwriting in question, the location where the manuscript was produced, and dating formulas: these aspects and more came into play. The book succeeded, not least because Mabillon published exact replicas of the documents in question. Printing had evolved into a tool that could build trust in books as truth-bearing instruments. By contrast, Jean Hardouin came to create a wild conspiracy theory: that all of ancient literature save for a few authors was forged, as were the records of the Church Councils and even the work of Church Fathers like Saint Augustine. All of it was invented – in Hardouin’s view – by medieval theologians seeking to give themselves a backstory for their logic-chopping, sometimes heretical work. How could one know? Hardouin claimed that printing was the cause: now that so many books were printed and easily available, it was easier to compare them and thus easier to “prove” forgery.

In an era with no established copyright law, very limited printing with type, and surrounded by handwritten volumes, how did one determine if a written work was authentic or a forgery? How did one talk about books? This chapter answers these questions by highlighting two thinkers, Angelo Decembrio and Angelo Poliziano. Decembrio wrote a dialogue, On Literary Polish. In it, his interlocutors discuss how to stock a library. As part of that conversation, the question arises of how to tell if a book is forged. Modern readers gain an unparalleled look into how Renaissance thinkers discussed manuscripts, what value they placed on tradition, and how correct judgments about literary authenticity often lived right next to those we now deem incorrect. Poliziano came to maturity at a time when most of what we now possess of ancient Greco-Roman literature had come to light. Confronting this mountain of newly available texts and with trial and error, he developed techniques that have become part of modern ways of editing and reading texts. Elsewhere he gives us testimony of how the vocabulary surrounding books developed, even as he stands as a signal figure in the history of philology.

This chapter takes up the issue of the expansion of the market for Shakespeare editions across the nineteenth century. A culture of home reading encouraged the practice of producing expurgated editions, which proved highly popular. A gradual broadening of the educational franchise had the effect of significantly raising the level of literacy in the UK, and this coincided with the cost efficiencies afforded by the industrialisation of printing, making it possible to serve a growing market with ever cheaper editions. The highly popular, inexpensive Globe Shakespeare is considered, together with subsequent editions which reduced the cost of complete works editions to unprecedentedly low levels (just sixpence, in the case of the Ward Locke edition). By the later decades of the nineteenth century Shakespeare was increasingly finding a place in school curricula, and some of the major schools editions – such as the Pitt Press and Clarendon editions – are considered in detail.

One of the more challenging intersections of law and technology is the use of computers and associated systems to commit criminal offences. While terminology varies, the neologism cybercrime is widely used to refer to a range of offending that involves computers as targets (eg hacking); as instruments (eg online fraud and forgery); or as incidental to the commission of a crime (eg using the internet to plan or organise a more conventional crime).1 As noted in Chapter 2, some cybercrimes are essentially the same as their ‘terrestrial’ counterparts, but adopt modern technology for their commission (ie ‘old wine in new bottles’), while others represent significantly newer forms of criminality. Examples of the former might include cyberstalking and online fraud, where the message is much the same but the means of communication is more efficient; while the latter might include distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against websites.

The chapter examines political corruption, i.e. embezzlement and extortion, and explores material aspects of forgery with regard to the close connection of the scribae with public documentation. It discusses accountability and the oath of due diligence and, as a result, public perception of the scribae in light of accusations of corruption and abuse. It highlights the profiteering character of the post and discusses examples of scribal enrichment and its consequences for the individuals' social mobility.

Chapter 3 analyzes how forged documents and fraudulent identities emerged in Biafra, considering how they overlapped with “legitimate” forms of official practice that the war had thrown into flux. These records show how the logics, tools, and skills of the battlefield inflected confrontations in Biafra, leading some people to survive in ways that the norms of war permitted, but the law classed as “crime.”

A concluding discussion of personal and textual identities, doubling, and fraud centres on a constellation of Scottish novels. Galt’s Andrew of Padua, the Improvisatore (1820) is a pseudo–autobiography wrapped in a pseudo–translation that leads readers on into a multilayered, improvised hoax. Republished together with his novel Rothelan in 1824, Galt’s tale joins several novels about imitation and imposture published almost simultaneously in that year: Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Scott’s Redgauntlet, Susan Ferrier’s Inheritance, Sarah Green’s Scotch Novel Reading, and versions of Walladmor by Willibald Alexis and Thomas De Quincey. Together, these works show how not only personal identity but also historical events and books themselves can be fraudulently duplicated. From the psychologically fragmented identities and demonic doubling illustrated in Hogg’s Private Memoirs to the fraudulent pseudo–translation Walladmor, these novels interweave the practices of speculation and identity construction typical of late-Romantic print and performance culture.

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.

The three Vaglianos reached their apogee as an international trading company during the 1860s-1880s. It is during this time that they opened the path of the Greeks to global shipping, and made maritime and commercial transactions on an equal basis with the world’s best; in 1881, in London they had a turnover of about £8 million sterling when Schröders had a turnover of £4 million and Rothschild’s £12 million. This chapter analyzes the functioning of their international trading house in trade, finance, and shipping. During the 1850s-1880s, the Vaglianos became the leading international trading house of the Greek entrepreneurial network. In 1858, following the tremendous profits the House enjoyed after the Crimean War, Panagi Vagliano went to the City of London, a move that proved to be decisive. Their activities in banking and particularly the legal confrontation Vagliano vs. the Bank of England illustrates the importance of the Vagliano Brothers in the City of London and its institutions, and investigates the dynamic interrelationship between the foreign City merchant bankers and the development of financial institutions like the bill of exchange.