ABSTRACT
The “fake studies” genre has been around long enough to have developed a number of conventions. The first is to declare an allegiance at the outset with either the universalists or the particularists, the lumpers or the splitters. Chicanery is both universal and perennial, but it assumes different forms in different ages; a critic may therefore choose to emphasize either its timeless or its timely aspects. Anthony Grafton, the most prominent of the universalists, begins his polymathic survey of fakes with some of the oldest surviving fragments from Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, and every few years we are treated to new frauds, whether as sinister as Kujau’s Hitler diaries or as trivial as the lip-synching antics of Milli Vanilli. “A relatively restricted group of colors,” Grafton observes, “makes the forger’s palette, now as two millennia ago.”1 Others, however, prefer to talk about forgeries as the products of a specific age, understanding them only against the background of that age. Ian Haywood, for example, notes that “The forgeries of Macpherson and Chatterton were intimately related to eighteenth-century British historiography,” and limits his discussion to that period.2
