Medieval Forgeries, Part 2

Yesterday's post started the discussion of forgeries and mentioned the Abbey of Saint-Denis. Forging documents was an attempt to re-create history to change the present. Even if we can determine that a document is "un-true," the attempt to forge a document can give us insight into the medieval mind and its desire to show what a person or institution thought should happen, although it did not.

In Forgeries and Historical Writing in England, France, and Flanders, 900-1200, Robert F. Berkhofer III explains just how crafty the monks of Saint-Denis were. They wanted to make the documents—granting them ancient rights, such as independence from the bishop of Paris—not only sound advantageous to them, but also appear to be ancient:

Many of these pseudo-originals reused authentic Merovingian papyri through a clever process designed to give ancient material basis to the invented text. First, the fabricators wrote on the reverse of a genuine papyrus, imitating the handwriting on the front. Then, they erased the front, which became the ‘back’ of the forgery. To make this deception less detectable, the fragile papyri were glued onto parchment for ‘support,’ which hid the original front.

So they used an old medium for the document, and even copied the style of penmanship! Almost one-quarter of the abbey's documents from before the millennium are inauthentic. This was an enormous attempt to increase their authority and autonomy in a very methodical manner.

We'll look at more examples of trying to alter history tomorrow.