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Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries (British History)
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Mick Harper
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In the Fake ’n’ Forgery business one is always entering a hall of mirrors. By definition, a fake only becomes a fake when someone, somewhere accepts it as authentic. Generally speaking, this is the end of the matter and little harm is done. In fact often only good comes. A ‘new’ Old Master hanging in your local gallery simply means thousands of happy burghers looking proudly at a painting that is in essence every bit as good as the real thing. Who gives a monkeys if Old Masters in general are minutely devalued -- they're a bunch of overvalued tossers anyway.

That is why the entire business is so pernicious. One might almost say ‘so necessary’. Unless it distorts history, then I suppose one should take an interest. When it comes to distorting world religions one can take it or leave it. Certainly, in the case of the Codex Amiatinus, this is what religious authorities have done.

In 1907 Pope Pius X commissioned the Benedictine monks in Rome to prepare a critical edition of Jerome's Vulgate, following largely the principles of, and according primary status to, the Codex Amiatinus text

To us Buddhists this is all very hilarious. The Pope might be infallible but he sure got taken for a ride on this one. Let’s watch how it happened.
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Mick Harper
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If we assume as our starting point that this is a scam perpetrated on (or by) the Laurentian Library in Florence we run into our first set of mirrors. According to the Library, they got the Codex Amiatinus from the San Salvatore Monastery in 1786. Now there are two problems here, two problems facing all proud owners of newly acquired artefacts: establishing provenance and establishing right-of-ownership.

Which might conflict. It’s all very well the abbot selling off a bit of silverware when the roof needs mending but when it comes to the oldest Latin Bible in the world, do the Rules of Cîteaux permit the monks flogging it off to the highest bidder and spending the proceeds on the gee-gees? I just don’t know. St Bernard was silent on the point. As has been the Laurentian Library who was the highest bidder. They were certainly knocking on an open door

The eighteenth century, however, is presented for the monastic community of San Salvatore with many problems, mainly related to mediocre and at times poor internal discipline of some members and neglected regular observance of the whole community, as the correspondence of the Registrar of the Province, that, on behalf of the regime, it sends to the abbots and monks of the individual monasteries congregati.

Scusi my Italian translation, but why was 1786 so important?
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Hatty
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According to the British Library, the production of three heavyweight bibles or pandects is described in the Life of Ceolfrith, contained in two separate manuscripts

The Life of Ceolfrid contains an account of the making of Ceolfrid's three great pandects. The anonymous author provides details which make it possible to prove the identity of the Codex Amiatinus. The Life, written by an anonymous monk, survives in only two manuscripts. Harley 3020 is the earliest

The provenance of the earlier, Harley 3020, manuscript is second half of the 16th century, i.e. after the dissolution of the monasteries, the earliest recorded owner being 'Willyam Fox'.

William and other members of the Fox(e) family owned land in Glastonbury and both manuscripts are from Glastonbury Abbey. The two manuscripts were separated, Harley 3020 being sold to Edward Harley, 2nd Earl of Oxford, in 1724.

There is no evidence of surviving pre-Norman manuscripts from Glastonbury Abbey in spite of the biographer of St Dunstan, a purported Abbot of Glastonbury, describing him as importing books from abroad in 956. Dunstan is a hugely important Dark Age character because "His work restored monastic life in England and reformed the English Church."

BL lists the Harley 3020 manuscript as 10th century, probably from Christ Church, summarised thusly

Author(s) Bede and the anonymous author of the Life of Ceolfrid
Title: History of the Abbots of Wearmouth and Jarrow, Life of Ceolfrid, Lives of Pope Calixtus I and other martyrs, the legend of Theophilus

There are some question marks over Calixtus I, pope and martyr, whose church in Rome is twelfth century and rebuilt in the sixteenth.

The 8th-century Chiesa di San Callisto with its beginnings apparently as a shrine on the site of his martyrdom, which is attested in the 4th-century Depositio martyrum and so is likely to be historical.

Nor is the manner of the pope's martyrdom fully accepted

Pope St Callixtus is venerated as a martyr, but his martyrdom legend is now regarded as a work of pious fiction. It involves his being thrown down a well (still to be found next to his church of San Callisto in Trastevere)
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Hatty
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The Depositio Martyrum can safely be discounted as a reliable doc I think even though it holds a world record

The Chronography of 354, also known as the Calendar of 354, was a 4th-century illuminated manuscript, which was produced in 354 AD for a wealthy Roman Christian named Valentinus by the calligrapher and illuminator Furius Dionysius Filocalus. It is the earliest dated codex to have full page illustrations. None of the original has survived.

The original volume has not survived, but it is thought that it still existed in Carolingian times, by the 8th–9th centuries. A number of copies were made at that time, with and without illustrations, which in turn were copied at the Renaissance.

Actually it has another record being the earliest manuscript to refer to Christmas as an annual festival held on 25th December. Could be one for Wiley as the AEL calendar genius.
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Mick Harper
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Yes, but the real question is what was known to post-1786 fakers, as they set about constructing their legend. We may know that Ceolfrith is entirely legendary but the fakers were only concerned as to whether the buyers would believe in him. And, since they still do in 2019, the answer is 'yes'.

One weak spot though is, if this is a purely commercial operation, was there a market for this (let's face it) relatively expensive production? When it's the Reformation or the Counter-Reformation money is no object, but of what value is even 'the earliest complete Bible in Latin' to a nineteenth century Florentine Library? But more light on this perhaps tomorrow.
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Mick Harper
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The monks at Amiati certainly had a reason to dispose of (or create de novo) assets because Henry VIII had come knocking. Or as he’s called in those parts the Habsburg Emperor Leopold II. I will let the machine translator take up the story

The Leopold suppression of 1783 condemning the monastery to a dark end. The employees asked the abbey with the benefits associated with them will become the property of the diocesan bishop; almost all the landed property is sold to the highest bidder; in 1788 the same cloistered buildings are sold to consumers and soon adapted to private homes with no regard to the architecture and decorations; Also the church is involved in this fast-paced change and so the crypt becomes the ossuary of the members of the Brotherhood of St. Mark Pope which is given in custody.

Couldn’t be much clearer than that. But not so fast! As we know from countless other examples, forgers always make use of cataclysms to account for gaps in the provenance – whether it be Viking raids or library fires – and this is surely no exception. It is difficult to believe that such a bunch of roisterers could not only have kept intact a twelve hundred year-old manuscript but, glory be, the provenance too!

The book is recorded in a list of the Abbey's relics dated 1036, describing it being an Old and New Testament 'written in the hand of the blessed Pope Gregory'.

Do they really take us for such fools? In the case of modern academics, yes.
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Mick Harper
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But whatever the Codex Amiatinus' past was, it is nothing compared to its future.

It remained in the San Salvatore Monastery until 1786 when it passed to the Laurentian Library in Florence. The dedication page had been altered and the principal librarian to the Laurentian, Angelo Maria Bandini, suggested that the author was Servandus, a follower of St. Benedict, and that it had been produced at Monte Cassino around the 540s

Don’t get us started on Monte Cassino (unlike Allied Tac Air in 1944) but this version simply couldn’t be allowed to fly

This claim was accepted for the next hundred years, establishing it as the oldest copy of the Vulgate, but in 1888 scholars in Germany noted the similarity to 9th-century texts

Oh my lor, Jerry’s got himself involved and lopped three hundred years off. The Italians turned to the Brits for support against the Furor Teutonicus to get the three hundred years reinstated

Giovanni Battista de Rossi established that the Codex was related to the Bibles mentioned by Bede

And the man from del Bloomsbury said, "Let's split the difference."

This also established that Amiatinus was related to the Greenleaf Bible fragment in the British Library

And, even though it was swings and roundabouts, it just about squeaked through

Although de Rossi's attribution removed 150 years from the age of the Codex, it remains the oldest version of the Vulgate

Now everyone was on the same page the real work could begin...
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Wile E. Coyote


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Hatty wrote:

Actually it has another record being the earliest manuscript to refer to Christmas as an annual festival held on 25th December. Could be one for Wiley as the AEL calendar genius.


Well spotted. (The manuscript that is) As for the Genius bit. I tried to do the clever stuff ie the calendar maths but failed. I then tried again, and failed again.

Then I remembered that accuracy was not my forte, and that the majority of ancients probably weren't that bothered either. They just cracked on as normal.

From 1155 till 1752 England and her Dominions managed with New Year's day on Lady's Day at 25th March. (that is why our new tax year starts 6th April, ie we retain Lady's day +11 days afterward to account for the calendar change to the Gregorian)

wiki wrote:
The Parliament held that the Julian calendar then in use, and the start of the year on 25 March, were

attended with divers inconveniences, not only as it differs from the usage of neighbouring nations, but also from the legal method of computation in Scotland, and from the common usage throughout the whole kingdom, and thereby frequent mistakes are occasioned in the dates of deeds and other writings, and disputes arise therefrom.[2]


Ordinary folks like Wiley crack on. It is your administrators who do the complicated maths, to make life easier, mostly for folks like them.
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Mick Harper
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In view of the many accumulated corruptions in all published editions of the Vulgate so far, the Oxford University Press accepted in 1878 a proposal from classicist John Wordsworth (later Bishop of Salisbury) to produce a new critical edition of the Vulgate New Testament

I should think so too. High time. Not that the OUP showed any great urgency

This was eventually published as Novum Testamentum Domini nostri Iesu Christi Latine, secundum editionem sancti Hieronymi in three volumes between 1889 and 1954

But they did insist on getting the Word of God as close to the time that God spaketh them as possible

the Codex Amiatinus being a primary source for the entire text

But the OUP are printers as well as publishers. What about questions of layout, punctuation, archaisms, stuff like that?

which also followed this manuscript in presenting the text in sense lines, cola et commata without any other indication of punctuation

So that's the New Testament put to bed, how's the Old Testament getting on?

In 1907 Pope Pius X commissioned the Benedictine monks in Rome to prepare a critical edition of Jerome's Vulgate, entitled Biblia Sacra iuxta latinam vulgatam versionem, which eventually emerged as a counterpart Old Testament to the Oxford New Testament, following largely the same critical principles, and according similar primary status to the Codex Amiatinus text (other than for the Psalms); and similarly deriving its layout, cola et commata from Amiatinus

And that's as far as we've got. You'll have to work out for yourself which mirror is reflecting which reality. It may all be true for all we know but one gets the strong feeling that churchmen and academics rather deserve one another. But then of course in the good old days, before Henry and Leopold, they were one another.
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Mick Harper
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All that remains now is to dispose of what started all this running and this is simply done by consulting just three lines of Wiki

Originally three copies of the Bible were commissioned by Abbot Ceolfrid in 692. This date has been established as the double monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow secured a grant of additional land to raise the 2000 head of cattle needed to produce the vellum

So, not only did one of the Bibles last thirteen hundred years but so did a land grant. Or, to look at it another way, Wearmouth-Jarrow conserved its land grants rather better than it did its Bibles. Actually rather better than Wearmouth-Jarrow itself because, as everyone here knows but as no-one out there knows, Wearmouth-Jarrow has disappeared without trace, lock, stock and archaeology. And we can name the usual suspects

Both houses were sacked by Viking raiders and in the 9th century the abbey was abandoned

Boo hoo. Was that finito then for the famed double-monastery, home of Bede, home of the Codex Amiatinus? Not quite

After the Norman Conquest of England in the 11th century there was a brief attempt to revive it

So, bye-bye, Wearmouth-Jarrow for a second time. But the phoenix was by no means finished

Early in the 14th century the two houses were refounded as cells of Durham Priory

Oh dear, our old friends at Durham Priory. Forgery Central, as we call it. They specialised in law suits featuring ‘old’ documents that established monasteries' rights over various parcels of land, and had the semi-independent Palatinate-Bishopric of Durham to make sure that not too many questions were asked in court. How much land, you'll want to know, would be required to support a double monastery in the fourteenth century? Obviously more than the few acres needed for routine vellum production (over and above what you could buy at the local leatherseller's shop at tuppence a sheet). Unless you were producing three massive Bibles simultaneously for no obvious reason at a time before there were leatherseller shops, that would definitely scale everything up

Originally three copies of the Bible were commissioned by Abbot Ceolfrid in 692. This date has been established as the double monastery of Wearmouth-Jarrow secured a grant of additional land to raise the 2000 head of cattle needed to produce the vellum.

"No, your Honour, we can’t produce the actual Bibles but we can produce the original land grant. We've highlighted the date "692" in magic marker for your Honour's convenience."
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Hatty
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The Echternach Gospels have just come up on Medieval Manuscript's Twitter. They're supposed to be 8th century, 'probably made in Northumbria'.

The source is Bede and just a few years after the need for a larger land grant to Wearmouth-Jarrow in 692

In 698, Irmina of Oeren granted the Northumbrian missionary Willibrord, Bishop of Utrecht, land at Echternach to build a larger monastery, appointing Willibrord as abbot

The reference to "Durham Priory. Forgery Central, as we call it" is opportune because the same scribe wrote both the Durham and the Echternach gospel books.
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Mick Harper
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the same scribe wrote both the Durham and the Echternach gospel books

He didn't 'get around' but his gospel books sure did. And, by all the heavens, managed to survive out of all the gospel books ever produced back in them there Dark Ages! If only our dear academics would shoot themselves with their own smoking guns (which they find with consummate ease) we might one day get some decent history.
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Mick Harper
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I suppose I ought to mention that the Echternach Gospels, though a founding relic of the State of Luxembourg, resides normally in Paris, France. But, forgery fans, forget the Eurostar, you can see it at the Anglo-Saxon Exhibition at the British Library in old London town. For a few precious months all the Greatest Hits of the Durham Fakers have been assembled together for your delectation.

And, when they've all been returned to their respective keepers, you can still pop along and see Cuthbert's Gospel which is permanently housed at the BL. You won't have to pay to get in but then you have already paid nine million pounds for it to be there (it used to be in a Catholic public school next to Jesus' foreskin) which is about nine million pounds over the odds.
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Mick Harper
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When checking whether foreskin should have a capital F in such a context I discovered it wasn't, it was a thorn from his Crown of Thorns. You wouldn't want to get those two things mixed up. In any case, as that American tourist said to his wife when looking at Michelangelo's David, "There's no F in foreskin." To which she said...
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Mick Harper
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And speaking of halls of mirrors, this came up courtesy of our old mucker, Stewart J. Brookes
‏
Woman: I love the Book of Kells
Man: So do I!
Woman: Have you seen it?
Man: No, but I’m planning a pilgrimage to the monastery in Lindisfarne
Woman: But The Book of Kells is in Dublin
Man: Not the *original* manuscript, that’s at Lindisfarne

(Overheard outside the Anglo-Saxon exhibition at the British Library)

Since the Book of Kells and the Lindisfarne Gospels were actually produced in (probably) Durham and the one really was the model for the other (can't say which way round), it's a case of many a true word said in patronising jest.
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