We are proud to introduce a new series, entitled De Falsa et Vera Historia, aimed at bringing together collective studies as well as monographs on the phenomenon of pseudepigraphy and textual and literary forgery in Antiquity.
The story behind this series can be traced back a decade when, in 2003, Antonio Guzmán gave a talk at a conference in Santiago de Compostela (Spain) on “pseudo-literature, forgery and canon” from a programmatic point of view. His presentation ignited interest in literary falsification in Spain, where, as in the rest of the academic world, the topic had received scant attention until the appearance of studies by the German philologist Wolfgang Speyer.
Subsequently, research into literary forgery in Spain has developed further and several scholars have gathered the fruits of their work in a number of collective volumes published as a legacy of Guzmán’s talk from 2003. The impressive number of publications brought out as a consequence of this seminal conference is clear proof of the strength of Guzmán’s words and also of the immense interest that the academic world has in literary and textual forgeries. Forgery is always in the backdrop of research into the arts, where authorship and canonicity invariably go hand in hand with aesthetic matters, although their inherent financial and political interests are the same and transcend art itself.
In the same way, at a meeting that took place in Oviedo (Spain) in 2012, these scholarly interests came into contact with similar concerns, focused on the forgeries of documents and epigraphy. In short order the affinities between the two fields of study, and the relationships that developed between these research groups, led to a joint publication, in 2014, entitled Realidad, ficción y autenticidad en el Mundo Antiguo: La investigación moderna ante documentos sospechosos, with contributions from national and international academics alike.
This new series is the result of all of these efforts and aims to provide a foundation for consolidating and diffusing the work of researchers interested in falsehoods and forgeries in different disciplines. The nucleus of the research published consists in the following topics:
- Authorship and authority
- Anonymity and pseudonymity
- Textual and literary authentication
- Forgeries in epigraphy, epistolography and historiography
- Forgeries of literary texts and documents
We do not see the above topics as exclusive or closed. Indeed, we are open to contributions on similar topics or interdisciplinary matters relating to the attribution and forgeries of texts, documents and literature.
In the same way, although the series will mainly consist of periodic contributions from different authors, the editors are also delighted to receive monographs related to our lines of research with a view to identifying interdisciplinarities, since they have proven so fruitful in the past.