Faking It!: The Performance of Forgery in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture

Faking It! collects eleven chapters which explore the question of forgery from different disciplinary angles: literary historical and art historical contributions share space with discussions of jewels, architecture and coinage. The various case studies take as their focus developments in Renaissance Italy and early modern England as well as in France, Germany, Malta, Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Russia and Australia. While each chapter contributes to a better understanding of the local context of cultural production, together they suggest new answers to how we can understand forgery. The concept of performance allows us to see beyond normative approaches and gain insight into some of the ambiguities concerning the nature of forgery.

Contributors to this volume: Brian J. Boeck, Federica Boldrini, Patricia Pires Boulhosa, Laurent Curelly, Helen Hughes, Jacqueline Hylkema, Philip Lavender, Lorenzo Paoli, Ingrid Rowland, Camilla Russo and Ksenija Tschetschik-Hammerl.

Philip Lavender, Ph.D. (2015, University of Copenhagen) is a researcher at the University of Gothenburg. He is the author of Long Lives of Short Sagas: The Irrepressibility of Narrative and the Case of Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra (2020).

Matilda Amundsen Bergström, Ph.D. (2019, University of Gothenburg) is a researcher at the University of Gothenburg. She has published many articles on early modern women’s writing, such as “Louïze Labé Lïonnoize. The Making of an Early Modern Author” in Renaissance Studies (2021).