ABSTRACT
One of the most important varieties of external contradiction-so important that Jeremy Bentham calls it the “first indication of forgery”—is the anachronism. “The falsehood of a writing will often be detected,” he writes, “by its making direct mention of, or allusions more or less indirect to, some fact posterior to the date which it bears.… The mention of posterior facts;—first indication of forgery.”1 The power of an anachronism to disqualify a questionable document is now widely taken for granted, so much so that the principles underlying such investigations are often assumed to be self-evident, but they deserve to be spelled out. An anachronism seems a violation of consistency only when it is believed that a work of art derives its authenticity not only from coherence with the real world in general, nor simply from the unifying power of a single intelligence, but also from the historically specific conditions under which it was created.
