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Inventing History : forgery: a great British tradition (British History)
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Hatty
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Mick Harper wrote:
Is the statement

The Theses were copied and distributed to interested parties soon after Luther sent the letter to Archbishop Albert

made because of the existence of the letter or is there independent corroboration?


Dmitri Levitin writing in The Literary Review says

The earliest testimonies for the Thesenanschlag in something like its modern form – albeit with no reference to Luther himself nailing the theses to the door – come from the 1540s.

but he doesn't mention a list of theses attached to a letter, or even a letter. Further on he writes that Peter Marshall concludes 'tentatively' that Luther sent out several copies of his theses privately.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/nailing-the-myth

P.S. Thesenanschlag is translated as 'theses-posting', as in posting up a notice, but Anschlag also means 'attack (as in terrorism), assault'.
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Wile E. Coyote


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Hatty wrote:
'7' (meaning 'and') seems to have been the most useful symbol in the Tironian shorthand system. Why something supposed to have been widely used would be wrongly transcribed is surprising.

Meanwhile someone blogging about Tiro's shorthand legacy writes

Keith Houston's wonderful Shady Characters delves into the history of the Tironian et (and its cousin the ampersand). He writes that the mark “prospered in the blackletter manuscripts of the Middle Ages” while the rest of Tiro’s system “fared poorly”:

Medieval shorthand in general found itself subject to a curious linguistic witch hunt. The secrecy and cypherlike nature of both traditional runic writing and shorthand did not coexist well with the distrust of witchcraft and magic prevalent in those times, and Tiro’s system was further stigmatized as a result. Briefly revived in the twelfth century, and later inspiring a series of copycat notations in English and other languages, the notae Tironianae were nevertheless a spent force.

https://stancarey.wordpress.com/2014/09/18/the-tironian-et-in-galway-ireland/

The blogger lists 96 variations of the Tironian 7. They differ so much that one might wonder how this shorthand system lasted so long or if it even existed prior to the twelfth century.


I don't get it. The Tironian 7 is a handy andy survial but the rest remarkably dies out because of its association with witchcraft and magic. ...right.....Total Bollox.

Rewind... it's latin shorthand that according to ortho takes off in the Carolingian courts (ahem) and yet Tiro 7 pops up in Latin, Anglo Saxon and Middle English texts, but only occasionally because of its association with witchcraft and magic, (I will just add in the odd bit of Tiro 7 because I don't want to be burned as a heretic).

It's more like a metallic strip going through paper money. It's signalling probably about origin.
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Hatty
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If 7 had survived from Tiro's day why would over ninety different marks, all supposed to represent et, be in use? People had had plenty of time to be taught how to write a Tironian 7, it's not complicated.

What's the point of a shorthand symbol for a short word like 'et' and why claim it is a Tironian invention? The whole story that it goes back to Tiro's time sounds like invention. Apart from monks no-one in England would know or care about Tiro/Cicero before the spread of grammar schools. Someone is getting way ahead of themselves.
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Mick Harper
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1517 Review Part Seven

Although Luther himself continued to look upon October 1517 as a seminal moment in his life

Told you so.

following his death (in 1546) the Thesenanschlag was barely, if ever, mentioned.

This is interesting and new (to me).

For 150 years or more his defiant appearance before the imperial diet at Worms and his public burning of the papal bull (issued by Pope Leo X and threatening him with excommunication if he didn’t recant) were considered to be far more significant events.

The one hundred and fifty years between 1550 and 1700 was, as it happens, the period when Sweden was a major player with an interest in 'guiding' public opinion. Her central difficulty in Grand Strategy was that although she was the leader of European Protestantism, her major ally was Catholic France. But why the switch c 1700? Well, as it happens, that was when Protestant Germany, the Pope and the Emperor were all on the same side (against Louis XIV) so a new direction of thrust was required, but I expect the book explains all this.

It was only in the 19th century that All Hallows’ Eve began to move into the spotlight as the moment the Protestant Reformation was born, and Luther and that hammer became shorthand symbols of a fuzzy-felt concept of ‘liberty’.

We seem to have skipped a century but there was nothing fuzzy about the relationship between German nationalism and liberty. Moira ought to reflect on the fact that German nationalism, at this time, was very left wing, very intelligentsia. She would certainly have been one herself.

Unfortunately, they also became symbols of anti-Catholicism and knee-jerk, thick-eared nationalism which – along with his unalloyed anti-Semitism – made Luther a natural pin-up boy for Hitler.

We seem to have skipped another century.

More later
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Mick Harper
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1517 Review Part Eight

Martin Luther was a complex, hot-headed and conflicted man with genuine concerns about the church he had dedicated his life to

He had a funny way of showing it.

who was alarmed by what he had inadvertently set in motion but utterly powerless to stop it.

Sorry, but this is complete bollocks. Or maybe I should read the book. Luther was a consummate revolutionary and knew the two basic rules of the Revolutionists’ Handbuch
1) cut your ideology to the prevailing cloth not the other way round
2) get some big battalions on your side quick as you can.
Now it is true he discovered other genies were out of the bottle but that is rule three
3) Forget the ancien regime, they're dead meat, concentrate on the genies via 1) and 2).

Which he did with great success. Remember, this is not Lenin operating in Russian chaos, it is Luther operating in the most prosperous and stable place in the entire world (outside maybe England). So he offers some intellectual stuff (for the middle classes) and some save-your-money stuff (for the lower orders). Actually a bit like Lenin come to think of it.

He would have been astonished and probably appalled to know that 500 years after he sent those 95 Theses to Archbishop Albrecht, both he and they would still be remembered and revered, not to mention demonized, copied, lampooned and satirized.

Believe me, Moira, he would be absolutely overjoyed.

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Mick Harper
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1517 Review Part Nine

From Coretta King saying of her assassinated husband (who was named for Luther) that ‘he nailed his demands to the door of City Hall, as Martin Luther had nailed his Ninety-five Theses to the door at Wittenberg’ to The Cluetrain Manifesto offering Ninety-Five Theses for the conduct of marketing operations in the Internet age, the Thesenanschlag has permeated almost every area of our modern lives – even if it never actually happened.

I like this. Civil rights is expected, internet marketing is not. Though actually the comparison is a bit stretched since neither Martin Luther King nor the internet bloke nailed theses on doors. It was the ninety-five theses and its after-effects they are going with, where they were first published is secondary. Unless the theses didn’t exist either. Blimey, that would be interesting.

And does it matter if it never actually happened? Well, yes it does. Affixing the Theses to the door of the Castle Church, although not a revolutionary act in itself (it was common practice in the University at the time – an invitation to other academics to debate the points raised

This is ridiculous. Like saying "The Communist Manifesto was not a revolutionary pamphlet (lots of pamphlets were published at the time..."

rather than a rallying cry to the disaffected and downtrodden) was publicly questioning church practices.

OK, if that's your position kindly list all the other bits'n'bobs nailed on church doors around this time that were publicly questioning church practices. Look, maybe I've got this all wrong and it was happening every other Sunday but, given what I thought I knew about the Church and its attitude to heresy, I don't think so.

Writing to his archbishop was raising his concerns privately. All the indications are that he never originally intended the Theses for public dissemination.

This is why the authenticity of the Bishop letter is so important. But now we’ve got a reverse puzzle. If nailing theses questioning church practices to church doors was routine why didn’t Luther do it? Let’s see ... Luther is so weird he is prepared to be burned at the stake ... as it were privately, just a matter between him and his bishop. Now that's my idea of a truly idealistic heretic.

More later
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Mick Harper
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1517 Review Part Ten

In 1517, Peter Marshall rounds up all the available evidence as to how this curious state of affairs came about, and how and when the story of the hammer and the church door gained so much traction, and lays it tidily before us with both clarity and a puckish enjoyment of its more absurd manifestations. He offers up, for instance, as a prime example of having one’s cultural cake and eating it, this gem from the website of the German National Tourist Board …

‘… it has been 500 years since Martin Luther nailed his 95 theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. Although there is no historical proof of this happening, it was an event that changed the world.’

I am just plain baffled. It is common ground that the story of the banging on the church door is one of the most potent myths of European history, and the Tourist Board is quite entitled to say “Look, this is the very church, come and see it.” It then behaves with exemplary scrupulosity to tell the tourist it may not have happened. Then it gets roundly condemned for having its cake and eating it!

In this quincentennial year, the market is inevitably awash with books on Luther and the Protestant Reformation. If you only want to read one or two of them … you could do a great deal worse than starting here.

I am having my doubts but if one of youse guys would do the honours and write back we might be able to take this matter further. I can't tell whether it's a mare's nest or a nest of mares.

ends
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Boreades


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Recommended reading:

John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century, by Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman

John Payne Collier was one of the most prodigious men of letters of the nineteenth century. His History of English Dramatic Poetry (3 vols, 1831) was a standard work of the period, and he subsequently proved himself a tireless editor of Shakespeare: Collier first edited the works in eight volumes (1842–44) and published his final edition (1875–78), just before his ninetieth birthday. Collier was, moreover, variously treasurer and vice-president of the Society of Antiquaries and a founding member of the Camden, Percy, and Shakespeare societies, for whom he edited a total of thirty-six works. He was still engaged in issuing reprints of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century works in his eighties—no fewer than eighty-one volumes appeared in 1871. Notwithstanding this, he also edited Edmond Spenser (5 vols, 1862), several volumes of ballads—some penned by himself—an autobiography, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare (1856), which he had attended and made shorthand transcripts of in 1811 and 1812. [End Page 372]

Yet today Collier's fame—or rather, his notoriety—rests upon his reputation as a literary forger. Central to this more wayward corpus is the "Perkins Folio," a second folio edition of Shakespeare's plays heavily annotated in what appeared to be a seventeenth-century hand. This "Old Corrector" was arguably a contemporary of Shakespeare's—arguably being the key word. Collier published the corrections (1853) and used them as the basis for two new editions (1853, 1858). In doing so he raised a gigantic rumpus. When the Perkins Folio was eventually inspected by Frederic Madden, keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, he declared that the annotations had been forged. Collier maintained that the annotations had been in the book when he acquired it and continued his researches. But the accusation stuck and cast serious doubt over all of Collier's work, with, it transpires, complete justification.

In this extraordinarily dogged account of Collier, Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman reveal that Collier's fabrications began early, drifting into forgery from the mischievous hoaxes and jeux d'esprit of his earliest work, such as the fanciful additions he made to his history of Punch and Judy (1828, illustrated by George Cruikshank). Collier's History of English Dramatic Poetry, for instance, contains dozens of often rather pointless fabrications, while for his life of Edward Alleyn (1841), Collier interpolated material into the manuscript sources he discovered at Dulwich College, actually writing on the manuscripts in the same pseudo-seventeenth-century hand he later deployed for the Perkins Folio.

The Freemans' untangling of Collier's vast legacy of misrepresentation is unerringly meticulous and completely convincing. The last monograph on Collier, Dewey Ganzel's Fortune and Men's Eyes (1982) argued that Collier had been set up by characters such as Madden, who planted the Perkins Folio on him to exact some sort of revenge. The enormous extent of Collier's deceptions exposed by the Freemans, however, make Ganzel's thesis entirely untenable. Instead of a victim of a conspiracy, we are left with a much more complex figure: a precocious student (he was first admitted to the reading room of the British Library aged just fourteen) who devoted his entire life and boundless reserves of intellectual energy both to scholarship and to its perversion. In the ringing tones that open the book, "What distinguishes him . . . is not the intrinsic merit or originality of his work (although much of it exhibits both, as well as prodigious labour), but the large-scale, pernicious, and pervasive corruption of literary history it has engendered, through a lifetime's supply of misinformation, false evidence, forgery, and fabrication" (xi).

The Freemans cover all this in the most scrupulous, and, it must be said, mind-numbing detail. John Payne Collier: Scholarship and Forgery in the Nineteenth Century is a remarkable, invaluable study and reference work, and simultaneously a staggeringly futile record of fifteen years academic hard labour.


https://muse.jhu.edu/article/218893

Did I mention the forgery?
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Mick Harper
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My eye was specially caught by this

and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's lectures on Shakespeare (1856), which he had attended and made shorthand transcripts of in 1811 and 1812.

What a brilliant wheeze. One of our themes is that many of the Classical treatises we so revere are actually medieval concoctions by people who wished to a) acquire a prestigious underpinning and b) escape Church strictures, for their own (entirely original) work. Even according to the Church you could not be a higher authority than, say, Aristotle but Aristotle could not himself be a heretic.

I don't know Coleridge's standing as a Shakespearean scholar in 1856 but I do know that neither he nor pretty much anybody else would be around in 1856 to contradict Collier's version of what he said in 1812. I am particularly impressed by 'the shorthand transcripts'! Hands up anybody who's seen people taking shorthand notes at a public lecture for use forty years hence.
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Boreades


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Against a background of Mary Queen of Scots, the 16 assasination attempts against Elizabeth, the Spanish Amarda, the Spanish Inquisition...

It was a period of fracton, intrigue, plot, counter-plot and sudden death, and every man who entered public life realised that he walked in the shadows of the Tower or the block. Very few escaped one or the other. What greater reason could Bacon have for secrecy? He was working out his vast project of educating the people to which the Queen had repeatedly registered her disapproval. Had the truth been known, his chance of any judicial appointment, essential in many ways to the working of his scheme, would have been irretrievably lost, apart from the fact that many had gone to execution for far less disobedience. Concealed and feigned authorship was not an unheard of thing in those days by any means. There were many ever watchful for heresies and many more for treason.

The incident with the Queen concerning the play Richard II bears out that fact ... The play, Richard II, was performed —anonymously— the afternoon before Essex broke into rebellion. It was denounced by the Queen as an act of treason. Bacon, as Solicitor-Extraordinary, was commanded to seek out the author of the play that he might be put on the rack. This alone proves that the authorship was not generally known.

Bacon's embarrassment can be well imagined. A scapegoat had to be found, someone outside the political arena and without motive for intrigue. All the data available point to the fact that the huckster Shagsper of Stratford was cited as the author, bribed with a thousand pounds through Bacon's friend Southampton, and despatched to his home in Warwickshire. His sudden acquisition of wealth supports the story, from which undoubtedly has sprung the germ of the present day myth and Stratfordian obsession.


And then ...

Philip Henslowe, the greatest theatrical manager and producer of his day, kept a diary(which is preserved) in which he set down the sums of money paid to authors for their work. We find in this diary the names of practically all the dramatic writers of that day excepting Shakespeare, his name being entirely ignored. Neither does Shaksper, Shaxspur, or Shagsper figure anywhere in this historic list of Henslowe's. After 1594, all plays were required to be registered before publication. Nothing was ever registered in Shakespeare's name, nor is there any trace of the actual writer with the various people who effected the registrations at Stationer's Hall. Bacon had his reasons for secrecy. Shakespeare none.
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Mick Harper
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Borry, you are putting up too much wodge and not enough bodge. Break it up with some comment!
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Boreades


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As I have special privileges at Stationer's Hall (and The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers), I'm willing to nip over there and check this out.
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Boreades


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Mick Harper wrote:
Borry, you are putting up too much wodge and not enough bodge. Break it up with some comment!


What kind of comment would you like?

More along the lines that Shakespeare the person is a great forgery?
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Mick Harper
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There's a good reason for the rule aside from the fact that only heroes like me wade through acreages of red and blue. Presumably there is some argument you wish to bring to our attention. Presumably you know what that is and why you agree/disagree with it. You will find if you force yourself to analyse it closely, if necessary line by line closely, you will find all kinds of nuggets for yourself as well as alerting the non-heroes as to what you (and your quotee) are going on about and why we all need to know about it. And finally, grandmother, here are some eggs...
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Mick Harper
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As I have special privileges at Stationer's Hall (and The Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers), I'm willing to nip over there and check this out.

While you're there, check out whether there are any extant newspaper accounts of Coleridge Shakespearean lectures 1811-2. You may have to go to Stanmore.
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