The Purpose of AE (APPLIED EPISTEMOLOGY)

[Mick Harper]

It may be a bit late in the day to be asking this question but it's easy, when you're having fun, to forget you're not here to have fun. If we forego all the 'pursuit of truth' metaphysics, I personally treat AE as a means of generating originality and new ideas.

Now it may be that I'm just peculiarly blessed in the originality and novelty department but I have observed that anybody can hike their natural background propensity. I have also observed my own acceleration. However, I decided this needed testing, so I conducted an experiment.

I selected a book of mine that was a bust in all departments -- and was the subject of some particularly vicious attacks from orthodoxy -- and considered how many new ideas there actually were in it. I did not concern myself at this stage whether they were big or small ideas, nor whether they were good or bad ones, they just had to be new.

So here's what I came up with for page one.

[Mick Harper]

Chapter One: Autumn Leaves
[Red bold are claims of originality on my part. Which I will discuss tomorrow.]

In September 2016 a book called Meetings With Remarkable Manuscripts by Dr Christopher de Hamel was published to rapturous acclaim. "It's the thriller of the millennium, one of the cultural highlights of the autumn," warbled Kirsty Wark on Newsnight. ‘An endlessly fascinating and enjoyable book,’ said the redoubtable Neil MacGregor. ‘Full of delights,’ agreed Tom Stoppard. ‘De Hamel’s book, scholarly but unfailingly readable, is the beginning of wisdom in all things scribal and scriptural,’ summed up the Guardian.

You get the picture. The great and the good were lining up to pay tribute to this season's Big Thing. I don't usually concern myself with these passing enthusiasms, they're harmless enough, but when the British Intelligentsia start lionising academics it interferes with my long-term goal of getting the universities abolished. So on this occasion I shall have to put my foot down.

These much admired manuscripts are for the most part forgeries. ||| Most of history before about 1300 is forgery. |||After that it starts to be more a question of misinterpretation than bamboozlement. Sorting it all out is quite an undertaking but once you know what you're doing everything unravels quickly enough and what you are left with can be knitted back into shape with surprising ease. |||

This is true right across the academic board. We have reached the stage where all the donkey work has been done by the academics and it just remains for the rest of us, who don't make a living at it but now thanks to the internet have access to it, to take it all apart and build it all back. You would be amazed at how much tripe there is out there once you reflect that ever since the age of five you have been taking their word for it. ||| Apart from a little bit of scientific method, it's all up for grabs.

In this book I will be dealing with a very small slice of the confection -- a handful of sixth, seventh, eighth century gospel books. 'Dealing with' meaning showing they are twelfth century forgeries made to look like sixth, seventh, eighth century gospel books. Ho hum, who cares, except maybe sixth, seventh, eighth century manuscript specialists?

You should for a start because it doesn't really matter which bit of the problem you begin unpicking, the academics have spent so much time and effort -- at our expense so don't waste your pity -- weaving it all together that you can just follow the thread back out of the labyrinth. I think that's enough mixed metaphors but just one more thing. Once it starts to go it starts to go. It can get a bit hair-raising. So for now just concentrate on the small picture: if it looks like it came out of the Dark Age it won't have come out of the Dark Age ...

[Mick Harper]

From a tactical point of view that's far too many -- if there had been any readers they would have flocked away in droves. But that's not the point here. The question is where did these 'new ideas' come from and where can you get hold of some if you happen to be short of a few.

From here is one place. There is no reason why you can't use AE's ideas. That's what distinguishes us from both academics and crazies. They don't have new ideas, they have 'the truth'. They operate from authority, the only difference being the medium they use. One being the classroom, the other the internet.

But let's suppose you're one of those people who want to be truly original. If you look at those ideas in red again you will recognise familiar tropes (of mine). So that's the first lesson: cling on to yours like grim death. They will serve you your whole life. Let's hope they were true but if they weren't that will dawn on on you soon enough.

But that still doesn't cover how you start on the process...

[Mick Harper]

Meanwhile, here's page two
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that's why it's called the Dark Age. Many of your most basic beliefs come out of the Dark Age.

* * *

A few ground rules you should be aware of. None of the manuscripts featured in this book have ever been scientifically dated. That might surprise you as nowadays this is a straightforward, cheap and non-destructive procedure. I can't offer you any science either – I've never clapped eyes on any of them – nor can I offer you any new scholarship – they wouldn't allow me a ticket to the British Library Reading Room (not if they've got any sense).

But this hardly matters, it's all on the internet. In any case, neither science nor scholarship is required because the forgeries are so childish they wouldn't fool anyone who hasn't got some good reason for believing in them. Admittedly that would appear to include the entire world. This disconnect between myself and the world has been occurring rather a lot lately and is a worrying trend. The world wants to buck its ideas up if you want my opinion.

All quotes are from standard sources. They have been mildly cherry picked, occasionally concertinaed and sometimes lightly edited for comprehensibility so I haven't given chapter and verse, but they are uncontentious. Anything in bold is somebody else’s work. I do specifically cite Dr de Hamel when using extracts from his book but these have had to be kept to a minimum due to Britain's ludicrously restrictive copyright laws. Not that Penguin Random House would risk the derision of silencing so obscure a critic on such footling grounds but you never can tell with behemoths. Let battle commence.

[Mick Harper]

The surprising truth is that all this started by complete accident. Hatty and I were writing what became The Megalithic Empire and we had come across a book about Welsh saints from somebody who was a serious researcher though not an academic.

We wanted to use some of the factual material in it so we checked out her sources and discovered... well, basically there weren't any. Not what you'd call sources in the sense of forming part of the historical record.

[Pete Jones]

[Mick Harper]

Oddly, I had severe reservations about that line, going through it this time. I didn't know then what I know now. But I suppose it is defensible if taken as part-metaphor.

Government-by-popinjay has become more and more important over the years. The idea that we always treat past (foreign) governments as being dolts, when we really mean 'differently ordered from our own'. I am by no means immune to the syndrome myself in, for instance, viewing President Trump as a dolt.

[Pete Jones]

My thought was that, if there were no Dark Age, then many of our basic ideas come out of the forgery factory that filled up the phantom Dark Age with basic ideas. Being a hostage 500 years later to what the scriptorium of monks put together is kind of a philosophical abyss to match the historical one. I'm immensely happy that at least I see it as a problem to be worked through

[Mick Harper]

You're such a smug bastard. A right Panglossian.

[Pete Jones]

Handed lemons, I make lemonade. Smugly.

[Mick Harper]

The beauty of the AE position is that creativity is not required. Once you have identified an error--and it can be large or small--your opponents provide all the 'creativity' you will ever need. There are thousands of them and they have been beavering away for... in this case thousands of years... writing your book for you. We've reached page three:
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Chapter 2: The Gospels of St Augustine

Dr de Hamel's book begins with a dramatic tableau

[Pete Jones]

ChatGPT summary of Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries (and the steps I took to generate it)

Me [to GPT]: Summarize a book?
GPT: Sure, let me know which book.
Me: Can I upload a book in Word format, and can you tell me how long it takes you to read it?
GPT: Sure.

...and then I uploaded...

The book you uploaded — Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries by M.J. Harper — contains approximately 52,532 words (about 310,733 characters) and took less than 1 second to process.

At an average adult nonfiction reading speed of 250 words per minute, it would take approximately 210 minutes (or 3 hours and 30 minutes) to read the entire book.

Now, here is a high-level summary of the book:
---

📘 Summary of Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries

Author: M.J. Harper
Published: 2017, Urquhart Press

M.J. Harper presents a bold and irreverent critique of mainstream academic history and manuscript studies, especially as it pertains to early English documents. His main thesis is that many of the most celebrated medieval manuscripts — especially from before the 13th century — are not authentic, but rather medieval forgeries created for political, legal, or ecclesiastical gain.

The book begins with a satirical takedown of Christopher de Hamel’s acclaimed Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, focusing in particular on the Gospels of St Augustine, a manuscript supposedly brought to England by the Christian missionary in AD 597. Harper argues this and similar documents are 12th-century creations, strategically manufactured by monastic institutions like Canterbury Abbey to bolster land claims, relic inventories, and institutional prestige.

Key arguments include:

-- Lack of scientific dating: No carbon dating or forensic authentication has been performed on these famous texts.

-- Forgery by necessity: Monasteries needed early documents to prove ancient land rights, especially after the Norman Conquest and the rise of Angevin legalism.

-- Anglo-Saxon charters as suspect: Harper dissects the dubious authenticity of hundreds of "Anglo-Saxon" land charters, most of which survive only in much later copies.

-- Academese as obfuscation: He attacks scholarly writing styles (what he calls "academese") for concealing a lack of substance or critical rigor in the humanities.

-- Language origins questioned: He argues that the supposed existence of early written Anglo-Saxon (Old English) may itself be part of the forgery tradition, undermining accepted views about the birth of English as a written language.

Harper’s tone is sardonic and combative, aimed squarely at academic orthodoxy. He proposes that history before 1300 should be viewed with intense skepticism, suggesting a sweeping reassessment of early medieval texts is long overdue.

---

Let me know if you want:

-- A chapter-by-chapter summary

-- A thematic breakdown (e.g. forgery, manuscript studies, Anglo-Saxon linguistics)

-- An extraction of key quotes

-- A comparison with Christopher de Hamel’s book

Or anything else.

[Pete Jones]

I then asked it for an extraction of key quotes and novel concepts.

It output a Microsoft Excel file, for some reason. (I haven't looked at that part yet, but once I do, I will post it here)....

Then I asked it for a summary of each chapter, the results of which are:

---

📘 Chapter-by-Chapter Summary of Meetings with Remarkable Forgeries by M.J. Harper

Summaries (truncated to the first 500 words per chapter):

Chapter 1: Begins with a critique of Christopher de Hamel’s 2016 book Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts. Harper questions the authenticity of many manuscripts presented therein and sets the tone for his own skeptical examination.

Chapter 2: Focuses on the Gospels of St Augustine. Harper disputes their provenance, suggesting they were created much later than traditionally claimed, perhaps in the 12th century to serve political purposes.

Chapter 3: Examines the Book of Kells, on display in Dublin. Harper argues that much of the assumed history is speculative and unsupported by scientific dating methods.

Chapter 4: Analyzes the so-called Gospel of Cuthbert. Harper compares it unfavorably to modern relic-cult marketing and questions the narrative built around it.

Chapter 5: Explores the “Durham Factory” — a term Harper uses to describe a systematic production of forgeries at Durham Cathedral. He alleges institutional complicity in crafting documents to fabricate legal and historical continuity.

Chapter 6: Discusses the Cotton Manuscripts, suggesting their hallowed status is based on 18th-century scholarly overreach rather than firm evidence.

Chapter 7: Critiques the history of Anglo-Saxon charters and coins. Harper claims many were backdated or invented to validate land claims and ecclesiastical authority.

Chapter 8: Concludes with an argument for forensic testing of ancient manuscripts and a call for academic humility in the face of limited evidence.

---

Let me know if you'd like this exported as a downloadable file (e.g., PDF, Word, or plain text) or displayed in a different format.

[Pete Jones]

[Mick Harper]

A second is a long time these days. But we knew all this. What we need to know is whether Forgeries has had any effect on the real world. Ask it for a critique of, say, de Hamel's book or the Book of Kells.

I bet I won't get a mention because ol' ChatGPT will also have noted my sales figures and whether my stuff features in Wiki or any other work of reference. I won't get in the first five hundred words, that's for sure.

PS Anyone who thinks this is all getting a bit self-referential should use something of their own--or anyone else they admire--to test the ChatGPT waters.