Authorship renounced

Journal of Scholarly Publishing

Volumn 41, Issue 1, 2009, Pages 31-55

  Henige, David ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN MADISON   (United States)

Author keywords

Authorship; False authorial attributions; Pseudohistory

Indexed keywords

EID: 70350761656     PISSN: 11989742     EISSN: 17101166     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.3138/jsp.41.1.31     Document Type: Article

References (101)

1. Laurie R. King, The Beekeeper's Apprentice, or On the Segregation of the Queen (New York: St. Martin's Press 1994), ix. This statement appears in a section called 'Editor's preface,' followed by a circumstantial account of how the manuscript came into King's hands. This work is only one example of the voluminous sub-genre of Sherlock Holmes pastiches mentioned below, nearly all of which necessarily adopt the 'found' manuscript pretence.
2. Willard Carroll, I, Toto: the Autobiography of Terry, the Dog Who Was Toto (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang 2001), 6-7, 14
3. Quentin Quesnell, 'A Reply to Morton Smith,' Catholic Biblical Quarterly 38, 2 (April 1976): 201
4. James Pritchard, Solomon and Sheba (London: Phaidon 1994), 30
5. Stanley Vestal, 'The Works of Sitting Bull Real and Imaginary,' Southwest Review 19, 3 (April 1934): 265-78;
6. Michael A. Elliott, Custerology: The Enduring Legacy of the Indian Wars and George Armstrong Custer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007), 207-8
7. According to Vestal, 'Works,' 266, there were still those in the 1930s who believed that Sitting Bull was 'a West Pointer, a close student of Napoleon's campaigns.'
8. J.R.R. Tolkien, 'Notes on the Shire Records,' in The Fellowship of the Ring (New York: HarperCollins 2002), 19, 18-21
9. Kristin Thompson, 'The Hobbit as Part of the Red Book of Westmarch,' Mythlore 56 (Winter 1988): 11-16, 12-3
10. Richard West, 'The Interlace Structure of The Lord of the Rings,' in Jared Lobdell, ed., A Tolkien Compass (LaSalle, IL: Open Court Publishing 1975): 77-94, 91 n. 3
11. Some issues of the ethics of pseudonymity are discussed in Joseph S. Fulda, 'The Ethics of Pseudonymous Publication,' Journal of Information Ethics 16, 2 (Fall 2007): 77-89.
12. The only really practical difference between the two forms is that pseudonyms are sometimes chosen in open invitation to be unmasked.
13. The magnitude of pseudonymity is made clear by the 16,800 examples, just from English literature, compiled in T.J. Carty, A Dictionary of Pseudonyms in the English Language (London: Mansell 2000); and this number, of course, excludes unsuspected pseudonyms.
14. See also Robert J. Griffin, ed., The Faces of Anonymity: Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2003), whose examples are drawn entirely from the British Isles.
15. For a contemporary example of the last see Tim Couzens, 'Pseudonyms in Black African Writing, 1920-1950,' Research in African Literatures 6, 2 (Autumn 1975): 226-31.
16. P.N. Furbank and W.R. Owens, The Canonisation of Daniel Defoe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 1988), argue for a short list of ca. 150 items, in contrast to the typical estimates of the preceding century, which had steadily climbed to nearly 600 attributions. Inevitably, other Defoe scholars think this number is too restrictive. Reservations are discussed in Irving N. Rothman, 'Defoe Deattributions Scrutinized under Hargevik Criteria: Applying Stylometrics to the Canon,' Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94, 3 (September 2000): 375-98.
17. For all discussions see Defoe Society, Defoe Bibliography, 2005-2008, http://www.defoesociety.org/bibliography. The differences arise in part from differing views of standards of proof and definitions of authorship.
18. To such an extent as to require special reference tools: The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1890, was originally published in five volumes between 1965 and 1988 and is now a dynamic interactive database (available at http://wellesley.chadwyck.com) designed to ferret out the real names of the scores of anonymous and pseudonymous British authors during this period.
19. Derwent May, Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (London: HarperCollins 2001), 414-59;
20. see also Robert H. Tener, 'Breaking the Code of Anonymity: The Case of The Spectator, 1861-1897,' Yearbook of English Studies 16 (1986): 63-73.
21. I alluded to this genre in an earlier essay in this journal, but only in passing; see David Henige, 'The Alchemy of Turning Fiction into Truth,' Journal of Scholarly Publishing 39, 4 (July 2008): 354-72, 365.
22. King, Beekeeper's Apprentice
23. Two hundred and sixty-five pastiches - an impressive number, but far from a complete inventory - are listed at Sherlock Holmes Pastiches, http://healthyhuman.net/shp.html.
24. See also Paul D. Herbert, The Sincerest Form of Flattery: An Historical Survey of Parodies, Pastiches, and Other Imitative Writings of Sherlock Holmes, 1891-1980 (Bloomington, IN: Gaslight Productions 1983).
25. Palmer plays editor to the point of footnoting his works.
26. A caveat: while I and others argue against the authenticity of the sources discussed here, the remote possibility exists that at least some of them - not the Red Book of Westmarch - will someday surface.
27. Umberto Eco, The Name of the Rose (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 1983), 4.
28. Brian Herbert, Dreamer of Dune: The Biography of Frank Herbert (New York: Tom Doherty Associates 2003), 535-6.
29. Much the same account appears in Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, Dune: House Atreides (New York: Bantam 1999), 602.
30. Ibid., 536
31. Sandy Auden, 'Sand in My Shoes: An Interview with Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson,' SF Site (2005), http://www.sfsite.com/07a/ sabh203.htm;
32. Linda Richards, 'The Sons of Dune: An Interview with Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson,' January Magazine (January 2000), available at http://januarymagazine.com/profiles/duneprofile.html
33. Byron Merritt, 'Frank Herbert Lives,' The Zone, http://www.zone-sf.com/ frankherbert.html, quoting Brian Herbert.
34. Ian Ascher, 'Interview with Kevin J. Anderson,' archived at http://web.archive.org/web/20070703213605 and http://www.digitalwebbing.com/interviews/042104_anderson.html. For whatever reason(s), the Web pages cited in this note appear no longer to exist as of July 2009. Fortunately, and relying on an ancient and possibly esoteric technology, I printed out the relevant passages.
35. Merritt, 'Frank Herbert Lives,' again quoting Brian Herbert. Merritt is Brian Herbert's nephew; avuncular licence?
36. Ascher, 'Interview.' More than eleven years to clean out a garage, no matter whose, is likely to strike most as highly implausible, especially if the 'his' refers to Brian Herbert, as seems the more likely case from the context.
37. Richards, 'Sons of Dune'
38. Jacopo d'Ancona, The City of Light, ed. and trans. David Selbourne (London: Little, Brown 1997)
39. For the most biting scholarly critiques of the work see T.H. Barrett, 'The Modern History of Asia and the Faking of "The City of Light,"' Modern Asian Studies 32, 4 (October 1998): 1017-23;
40. Igor de Rachewiltz, Review of City of Light, Journal of Asian History 32, 2 (1998): 180-5;
41. and Patrick Gauthier Dalché, Review of City of Light, Revue des études juives 162, 1/2 (January-June 2003): 261-3.
42. Other negative reviews include Hillel Halkin, 'The Strange Adventures of Jacob d'Ancona,' Commentary 111 (April 2001): 28-35,
43. with replies, Commentary 112 (July-August 2001): 10-4;
44. George Walden, 'I Smell a Rat,' Literary Review, available at http://www.users.dircon.co.uk/~litrev/199711/188.html
45. and Doreen Carvajal, 'Marco Polo: Is a Rivalry Just Fiction?' New York Times (9 December 1997).
46. Roz Kaveney, Review of The City of Light, New Statesman (24 October 1997): 45
47. Bernard Wasserstein and David Wasserstein, 'Jacopo Spurioso,' Times Literary Supplement (14 November 1997): 15-6
48. Philip Glazebrook, Review of The City of Light, Spectator (1 November 1997): 39
49. For defences of authenticity see the modern editor's reply in Jacopo d'Ancona, The City of Light, trans. and ed. David Selbourne (New York: Citadel 2000), ix-xiii, 431-73 (by Wang Lianmao);
50. and letters to the London Review of Books, available at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v21/n01/letters.html.
51. City of Light, ibid., xiii
52. The Albanian Book became the basis of Abduragimov's Kavkazskaia Albaniia - Lezgistan: istoriia i sovremennost' (St Petersburg: Izd-vo Dagestanskogo gospeduniversiteta 1995).
53. Quoted in Murtazali S. Gadjiev, 'The Writings of Caucasian Albania: Facts and Falsifications' in Philip L. Kohl, Mara Kozelsky, and Nachman Ben Yehuda, eds., Selective Remembrances: Archaeology in the Construction, Commemoration, and Consecration of National Pasts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2007): 97-126, 108. The Caucasian Albanians are distinct from the European Albanians.
54. Ibid., 113
55. Libro Copiador de Cristóbal Colón: correspondencia inedita con los Reyes católicos sobre los viajes a América, ed. Antonio Rumeu de Armas, 2 vols. (Madrid: Testimonio Compañía Editorial 1989)
56. For treatments of the libro copiador as historical evidence see David Henige, 'Finding Columbus: Implications of a Newly-Discovered Text,' in Cecil H. Clough and P.H.H. Hair, eds., The European Outthrust and Encounter (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press 1994): 141-65;
57. Margarita Zamora, 'Christopher Columbus's "Letter to the Sovereigns": Announcing the Discovery,' in Stephen Greenblatt, ed., New World Encounters (Berkeley: University of California Press 1993): 1-10.
58. Morton Smith, The Secret Gospel: the Discovery and Interpretation of the Secret Gospel According to Mark (New York: Harper & Row 1973)
59. E.g., Quentin Quesnell, 'The Mar Saba Clementine: A Question of Evidence,' Catholic Biblical Quarterly 37, 1 (January 1975): 48-67;
60. Stephen C. Carlson, Gospel Hoax: Morton Smith's Invention of Secret Mark (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press 2005);
61. Peter Jeffery, The Secret Gospel of Mark Unveiled: Imagined Rituals of Sex Death, and Madness in a Biblical Forgery (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2006).
62. Arguments for authenticity are summarized in Scott G. Brown, Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press 2005). The length of the bibliographies in each of these works highlights how controversial the subject became almost instantly, as matters biblical are wont to do. Defenders typically - and, obviously, faute de mieux - regard the photographs as adequate for evaluating authenticity.
63. For photographs as dubious evidence see David Henige, Historical Evidence and Argument (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press 2005), 198-9, 271-2 nn. 56-7, and sources cited there.
64. Charles W. Hedrick, 'Secret Mark,' The Fourth R 13, 5 (September/ October 2000), available at http://www.polebridgepress.biz/Periodicals/ 4R_Articles/secretmk.html
65. Thus Quesnell, 'Mar Saba Clementine,' asks all the right questions about provenance, but in his direct reply Smith glosses over the issue in a few sentences: Morton Smith, 'On the Authenticity of the Mar Saba Letter of Clement,' Catholic Biblical Quarterly 39, 2 (April 1976): 196-9.
66. Morton Smith, 'Clement of Alexandria and Secret Mark: the Score at the End of the First Decade,' Harvard Theological Review 75, 4 (October 1982): 449-61, does not address the matter at all.
67. Amin D. Baum, Pseudepigraphie uns literarische Fälschung im frühen Christentum (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2001), catalogues a large number of early Christian fakes - fakes, that is, by virtue of the later canonization of other texts. Edwin Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha (Boston: Little, Brown 1956), briefly addresses sixteen modern forgeries related to New Testament, most of them of the 'found' manuscript species.
68. H. Rider Haggard, She, a History of Adventure (London: Longmans Green 1887), introduction
69. Norman Etherington, ed., The Annotated She: A Critical Edition of H. Rider Haggard's Victorian Romance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1991), xix-xxiii. This process included such things as inscriptions written in authentic classical Greek and up-to-date geographical and ethnographic data.
70. E.g., Daniel Tangri, 'Popular Fiction and the Zimbabwe Controversy,' History in Africa 17 (1990): 293-304
71. C.C. Blatchly, 'Caution Against the Golden Bible,' New-York Telescope (20 February 1830), as illustrated in Donald Q. Cannon, 'In the Press: Early Newspaper Reports on the Initial Publication of the Book of Mormon,' Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 16, 2 (2007): 4-15, 7, available at http://mi.byu.edu/publications/jbms/ ?vol=16&num=2
72. Ibid.
73. See Dan Vogel and Brent Metcalfe, eds., American Apocrypha: Essays on the Book of Mormon (Salt Lake City, UT: Signature Books 2002). All the authors in this work doubt the historical reality of Smith's golden plates. Examples of defences of the Book of Mormon, written in response to American Apocrypha, are Larry E. Morris, 'The Private Character of the Man Who Bore the Testimony: Oliver Cowdery and His Critics,' FARMS Review 15, 1 (2003): 311-51, available at http://mi.byu.edu/publications/review/?vol=15&num=1&id=477
74. and Larry E. Morris, '"I Should Have an Eye Single to the Glory of the Lord": Joseph Smith's Account of the Angel and the Plates,' FARMS Review 17, 1 (2005): 11-82, available at http://mi.byu.edu/ publications/review/?vol=17&num=1&id=567.
75. Several attempted rebuttals merely argue irrelevancies, e.g., William J. Hamblin, 'Sacred Writing on Metal Plates in the Ancient Mediterranean,' FARMS Review 19, 1 (2007): 37-54, available at http://mi.byu.edu/ publications/review/?vol=19&num=1&id=637.
76. David Henige, 'The Content, Context, and Credibility of La Florida del Ynca,' The Americas 43, 1 (July 1986): 1-23
77. Although there were early critics, notably Geoffrey's younger contemporary, William of Newburgh, who called Geoffrey's work 'a laughable web of history': William of Newburgh, The History of English Affairs, ed. and trans. P.G. Walsh and M.J. Kennedy (Warminster, UK: Aris & Phillips 1988), 29.
78. E.g., Acton Griscom, ed., The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth (London: Longmans, Green and Co. 1929), 151-3
79. For earlier scholarly opinions - almost entirely unfavourable - on this aspect of Geoffrey's work see ibid., 106-13.
80. Griscom considered these views to be 'dogmatic and hostile' (106), but they represent the great weight of scholarly opinion then and now; see, e.g., Valerie I.J. Flint, 'The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth: Parody and Its Purpose. A Suggestion,' Speculum 53, 3 (July 1979): 447-68;
81. Francis Ingledew, 'The Book of Troy and the Genealogical Construction of History: The Case of Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae,' Speculum 69, 3 (July 1994): 665-704;
82. Ad Putter, 'King Arthur at Oxbridge: Nicholas Cantalupe, Geoffrey of Monmouth, and Cambridge's Arthurian Foundation Tradition,' Medium Aevum 72, 1 (2003): 63-81.
83. Griscom, The Historia, 124
84. James G. Farrow, 'Aeneas and Rome: Pseudepigrapha and Politics,' Classical Journal 87, 4 (April/May 1992): 339-59;
85. Knut Usener, 'Dictys und Dares über den Troischen Krieg: Homer in der Rezeptionskrise?' Eranos 92 (1994): 104-20;
86. Stefan Merkle, 'Telling the True Story of the Trojan War,' in The Search for the Ancient Novel (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 1994), 183-96;
87. Stefan Merkle, 'The Truth and Nothing But the Truth: Dares and Dictys,' in Gareth Schmeling, ed., The Novel in the Ancient World (Leiden: E.J. Brill 1996): 563-80
88. The Trojan War: The Chronicles of Dictys of Crete and Dares the Phrygian (Bloomington: Indiana University Press 1966), 19, 20. The first scenario is in the covering letter allegedly written by Lucius Septimius, who apparently failed to notice that the preface of the work contained a different explanation.
89. Ibid., 133.
90. For other examples from classical antiquity see C.R. Ligota, '"This Story Is Not True": Fact and Fiction in Antiquity,' Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institute 45 (1982): 1-13.
91. 2 Kings 22: 8-11
92. There are, of course, numerous commentaries on this text; see, among others, Mordechai Cogan and Hayim Tadmor, eds., II Kings (Garden City: Doubleday 1988), 281-97.
93. These generally accept that something was somehow discovered on this occasion. Others, e.g., Lowell K. Handy, 'Historical Probability and the Narrative of Josiah's Reform in 2 Kings,' in Stephen W. Holloway and Lowell K. Handy, eds., The Pitcher Is Broken: Memorial Essays for Gösta W. Ahlstrom (Sheffield, UK: Sheffield Academic Press 1995): 252-75, are more dubious.
94. For an overview to the early 1990s see Norbert Lohfink, 'Recent Discussions on 2 Kings 22-23: The State of the Question,' in Duane L. Christensen, ed., A Song of Power and the Power of Song: Essays on the Book of Deuteronomy (Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns 1993): 36-61.
95. Iain Provan thinks that the 'book' had not been missing long, since he discerns an 'impression throughout Kings' that it had been 'available to the various rulers of Israel and Judah,' but this presupposes that the biblical text had been written earlier than the reign of Josiah, rather than later, which is now the majority opinion among scholars. Iain Provan, 1 and 2 Kings (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers 1995), 271.
96. For exceptions see Thomas C. Römer, 'Transformations in Deuteronomistic and Biblical Historiography: On "Book-Finding" and Other Literary Strategies,' Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft 109, 1 (1997): 1-11;
97. and A.J. Droge, '"The Lying Pen of the Scribes": of Holy Books and Pious Frauds,' Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 15, 2 (2003): 117-47.
98. For my own take on this case see David Henige, 'Found But Not Lost: a Skeptical Note on the Document Discovered in the Temple under Josiah,' Journal of Hebrew Scriptures 7, art. 1, available at http://wwwjhsonline.org or http://www.arts.ualberta.ca/JHS/articles/ article/_62.htm
99. As it happens, Josephus' reputation is probably higher than it should be precisely because it is so necessary to take him at his word on events for which he cites sources not cited by any other authors. For one example where Josephus cited a source not otherwise attested see David Henige, 'Josephus and the Tyrian Kinglist,' Transeuphratène, forthcoming.
100. In fact, the similarities are very close, as is demonstrated in Mark Jones, Paul Craddock, and Nicolas Barker, eds., Fake? the Art of Deception (London: British Museum 1990), and Mark Jones, ed., Why Fakes Matter: Essays on Problems of Authenticity (London: British Museum 1992).
101. Despite these examples - only a small selection of the known whole and an even smaller selection of the actual number - the majority of 'found' sources turn out to be legitimate when subjected to scrutiny, as the examples of the Bamboo Annals in China, the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the Libro Copiador demonstrate. Each of these had had to pass tests, however, before being accepted in the respective scholarly communities.