The following words address the complex nature of "authenticity" in the written record and, by raising the complexities, seek to redeem several writers whose works challenge the concept of "authenticity" and who are thus relegated to gray areas in the history of letters.
The questions underlying such matters as forgery and false attribution seem to be straightforward enough. Did this author write this work or not? so, the work is "authentic" and legitimately bears the "authority" of the "author." If not, the work is inauthentic, and the "authority" is illegitimately claimed.
What does this do to those texts we know certainly not to have been written by those whose names are attached to them? From the viewpoint just proposed works of this kind would be "inauthentic" -- such as: the Iliad, the Odyssey and the Pentateuch. The problem of author attribution clearly lies at the very roots of the cultures of the West and is not just the problem of the occasional medieval document forgery or of the vain, would-be Renaissance humanist.1
To be sure, the oldest kind of fictitious authority, such as Homer and Moses represent, has little in common with trivial, opportunistic forgeries. Fictitious authority of the Homeric and mosaic kind refers to points in a history of ancient collective authorship and redaction. The works ascribed to Moses and Homer were libraries. To deprive a library of an author would be to consign it to the realm of the anonymous. The traditions of the West seem to consider anonymity, by and large, unauthoritative or otherwise lacking in some necessary or desirable quality.
There are important exceptions to this rule: medieval tradition seems to demand anonymity of certain kinds of narratives, especially oral narratives in poetic language, usually in the vernacular, that have historical events of "the nation" as their subject. There anonymity seems to be considered authoritative, and no author (or even eye-witness) would be considered trustworthy: consider the Chansons de Geste, the Spielmannsepos, the Digenes Akrites.2
It is quite conceivable, although wholly unprovable, that similar rules prevail among the original poets of the Greek epics and the inspired writers of the old parts of the Pentateuch. The absence of competing names suggest it. As these texts entered recorded history, however, other rules prevailed, those distrusting anonymity. We may, I think, say something similar for the anonymous works of the Middle Ages: when such works are no longer composed and those surviving have become the property of scholars, the search for authorship begins.
There is no reason to believe that the redactors perceived themselves as engaged upon a falsification, when they named the epics after Homer or the Pentateuch after Moses. Given the open disparity between the oldest (probably oral) parts the works and the conjectured time of literary redaction, hoary tradition must ready have provided the redactors what they needed in the way of authorial identities.
But that is only one kind of authorial fiction, and it resides in a privileged place at what is perceived to be the beginning. Countless other documents written by unknown authors have entered the tradition under the names of others or somehow attached to or interwoven with their works: consider the Homeric Hymns, Ecclesiastes, the Song of Songs, Wisdom, the interpolations in Isaiah and Daniel, the apocalypses of Enoch and Ezra, the dialogues of the thrice greatest Hermes, Dictys, Dares, the Sibylline Oracles, Dionysius the Areopagite, the Pseudo-Isidorean Decretals, Fredegarius, why even the Donation of Constantine.
In the case of Homer and Moses, tradition certainly provided the redactors with the name of the author. In the case of "Solomon," (Deutero-) Isaiah, Daniel, Enoch, Ezra, Dictys, Dares, Callisthenes, Hermes, the Sibyls, Dionysius, and Isidore, the writers, compilers, or redactors seem, more or less consciously, to have assumed the authority of some famous personage (or eye-witness), to assure the audience of the importance (or reliability) of their work. Tradition here plays the role of providing a name, sometimes even a text on which to hitchhike (Isaiah, Daniel). As opposed to the cases of Homer and Moses, however, tradition alone did not force a name onto a work. Tradition thus plays at least two distinct roles in the "authorship" of anonymous works: 1) it can impose a name on a work directly, 2) it can supply a dictionary of names.
The towering authority of tradition is such that it may obscure some important questions that need, nonetheless, to be asked: what did the younger authors or redactors think they were doing? what did the audience think was being done to it? There can be little doubt that the writers or compilers sought to win authority for their works by assigning them famous authors who had long before seen God. Did the writers, however, mean to deceive? Were their intended readers deceived? Did everyone at the time accept this as a convention?3
It is exceedingly hard to answer these questions. The circumstantial evidence does not point to reasonable, consoling answers. The Sibylline Oracles were composed, as far as the scholarship can determine, in the same years as most of the great apocalyptic texts, sometime between the first century B.C. and the third century A.D. The oldest substrate was almost certainly of Jewish origin and was employed to proselytize among Hellenistic and Hellenized Roman gentiles.4 The Jewish authors certainly knew that they were engaging upon a deception, however holy the cause.
The next redaction of the Sibylline Oracles, which directly overlays the Jewish substrate, interpolates Christian history and doctrine into the same works. Did the Christian redactors know that they were dealing with a falsification to begin with? that no "authentic" Roman Sibyl would know about Noah and Abraham? Perhaps, but also perhaps not. And what about the pagan audience for which the proselytizing work was intended?
The authors of the esoteric dialogues attached to the name of Hermes Trismegistos were themselves probably writing in an honored tradition. They had named the god themselves, conflating him of native Egyptian and Hellenistic precedents and placing him in dimmest, most sacred ancient time. For the most part, the dialogues are timeless theosophy and only rarely refer to current events.5 By type, they resemble the fictitious authority of foundation documents, and Hermes is more like Homer or Moses than the pseudonymous publicists of the Sibylline books. Both Tertullian (second-third century) and Lactantius (third-fourth century) seem to have thought there had in fact been such a person as Hermes and that he was the source of the wisdom of the Greeks. By the time the Hermetic text called "Asclepius" reached Latin and was transmitted throughout the West in several redactions and imitations, the readers certainly thought they were reading "prisci theologi," thought so, dating Hermes more or less in the time of Moses, Atlas, and Prometheus, as did Agrippa von Nettesheim. While we are among this crowd of Renaissance explorers of the ancient heritages we may name Johannes Reuchlin who, like his Italian predecessors, believed that the cabalistic texts he was uncovering for the Christian north represented the secret oral tradition of the Jews going back to Moses himself.6
To return to the authors of these traditions, why did the late fifth-early sixth-century, probably heretical Syrian author of the Celestial Hierarchies, the Mystical Theology, and the Divine Names choose the identity of St. Pauls Athenian convert Dionysius? Was it merely a respected convention as in the case of Hermes? And if so, would the Council Fathers who appealed to him for their monophysite doctrines in 533 risk citing a near contemporary? Or did they want the Council to know or think that he was so? Was not St. Paul's own convert a safer witness?7 And when Ps.-Dionysius reached the West in the ninth century, did the pious Carolingians have the vaguest notion that this mysterious, sacred text had any author other than what the text claimed? Almost certainly not.
It is, in fact, the norm to consider the works composed by the people named as their authors. Why would anyone want to lie about such things? especially insofar as they generally referred to the beginning of things, in which we invest so much importance and about which we have so little information.
Apart from their pseudonymity, such works as are mentioned above have at least this much in common: that their content lays claim to extraordinary importance. But the works do not represent any single genre one could call simply "pseudonymous literature." They variously belong to the epic, legal, poetic, ecstatic, prophetic, philosophical, and even the historical. For the present purpose, however, distinctions of genre are not quite so important as distinction which address the degree of authority a work can claim. Its "privilege" may protect it from too close authorial scrutiny.
The highest "privilege," belongs to sacred texts and, within that category, the very highest belongs to those sacred texts declared by the canon to have a divine author. Here, the identity of the human author is quite incidental, and the rules of correspondence between claim and actuality do not apply in the same way as they may apply to other texts: thus the Pentateuch, indeed, all of the Bible.
Next in privilege, and still within the category of "sacred," are those texts which themselves claim ecstatic origin and can be called "apocalyptic" in an etymological sense, that is "revealed" by a higher power to the named author. Some canonically sanctioned texts overlap with this category (e.g., Isaiah, Ezechiel, Joel, Revelation) but most do not. Ecstatic origin was no assurance of canonical approval. Non-canonical ecstatic texts, however, seem also to share a degree of the privilege accorded canonical texts of all kinds: that is, the person who recorded the events was of little importance; of somewhat greater importance was the authority of the persons who were recorded as having experienced the events: thus, for example, Enoch, (Deutero-) Isaiah, (2 or 4) Esdras, and the Sibyls.
Works dealing with the Holy but not particularly ecstatic in character, the writings of Ps.-Dionysius, for example, or the dialogues of Hermes, also lay claim to privilege as much by content as author. They, however, have much less to say about the mysteries of destiny, of time in the world, than their ecstatic counterparts and deal more thoroughly with the timeless. Perhaps for that very reason, Hermes and Dionysius enjoyed far more continuous and widespread influence than most of the apocalyptic writings outside the canon, Hermes penetrating deep into the Islamic East, as far as India, and Dionysius deep into the Latin West, as far as Ireland.
The nature of "history" within the category of the sacred is extraordinarily complex. In a secular age, the process of "Euhemerism" is familiar, routine, the norm, that is, the desacralization of certain kinds of sacred texts: they do not actually deal with the gods but with great men of the past whom time has deified. The authors of the historical libraries within the Bible seem to have engaged upon similar activities long before Euhemerus, taking ancient Semitic deities and their adventures, stripping them of divinity, and making of them moments in terrestrial history. These euhemerized deities were, however, not thereby secularized, but rather resacralized as moments in the sacred history of the nation.8
In the course of the ages, the West historicized the histories of the Bible still further, seeking every manner of concordance with non-sacred history, but the authoritative model was far less biblical history than the historiographic tradition of Greece and Rome. Eusebius and Orosius, if they can be called the fathers of Christian historiography, employed models far from the Hebrew Bible. Their intellectual heritage began not with Moses but Herodotus. This very troublesome reality invites the conjecture that it was precisely the privilege of the sacred texts which deprived them of applicability to "real" history--that the day-to-day history of the Church more closely conformed to that of the world, of the sæculum, than to that of the People of God.9
The ultimate question which most of these histories asked was that of origins: where did we, our institutions, they and their institutions come from. By one means or the other they seem always to refer to the beginning of things, the world, the race, the empire, the nation, the church.
Virtually all the aforementioned works take authority from or give authority to origins or the heroic past or both. We may except some of the apocalypses, especially the Enochs and Esras, but even they could be made to fit, given their attention to primordial time, "Urzeit," as they go about the business of describing the termination of time, "Endzeit."10 Moses, the Sibyls, Virgil, Hermes, Dionysius all refer to the beginnings of things.
The literature of the beginnings of things overlaps in part with these purely or quasi-hieratic documents, but there are others, chiefly of "patriotic" provenance--if we may use such an anachronism--such as the Aeneid, the grandfather of all or most European origins legends. Such origins legends as begin and end in the universe of folklore may properly be excluded from these considerations, because the rules of authenticity are different. One thinks of the Gothic and Langobardic origins myths which, while they are recorded in Latin, were always clearly understood to be of vernacular provenance and therefore to lack the authority of the learned tradition. The Virgilian origins legends were, by contrast, bookish, composed by the learned who must have known what they were doing when they invented tales for their young nations and attached them to the glories of Roman antiquity.11
The oldest of these is the tale of the Trojan origin of the Franks, preserved in the so-called Fredegarius and written down in the eighth century, within a century or so of the most famous forgery of all time, the Donation of Constantine, and in response to similar historical forces, namely, Frankish imperialism.12 In the English-speaking world, the most famous of these legends is Brutus of Troy, father of the Britons.13
Cognate legends make the soldiers of the army of Alexander the Great the fathers of the Saxons: thus Widukind of Corvey, writing in the tenth century for the imperial Saxon Ottonians. Trier (or Treves) was made the foundation of Trebeta, son of Ninus of Babylon, stepson of Semiramis who like Phaedra and Potiphars wife lusted after an innocent and drove him from favor. This legend arose in the eleventh century during and as a part of the Investiture Controversy, presumably in order to make Trier worthy to be another Rome, as indeed it once had been.14
In the Middle Ages one finds an occasional attack on such commonly accepted beliefs about things ancient. The examples of William of Newburgh and Gerald of Cambrai leap to mind. Their attacks on Geoffrey of Monmouth and the whole Arthurian universe show that there was an occasional critical mind to be found in the ocean of medieval gullibility.15
Back in 1962 there was a meeting of the German historians association at Duisburg which was exclusively dedicated to the question of medieval forgery, more of legal documents than the kind of cultural monuments we have so far been treating here.16 We are told that of the 262 documents which have survived over the name of Charlemagne 100 or so are forgeries (p. 532). And the forgers include more than backroom anonymouses, for example, Archbishop Hincmar of Reims (845-882), Bishop Pilgrim of Passau (971-991), and Pope Calixtus II (1119-1124). Hincmar apparently took to writing counterforgeries when presented with inconvenient documents, indeed, took forgeries, reforged them, and threw them back at his opponents.
The historians at that congress precluded political advantage as the sole motive for forgery simply because there were too many forgeries that had no political content whatsoever. An eleventh-century reformer, for example, complaining about the quasi-pagan habit of sprinkling the already baptized with baptismal water promptly produced a letter of Pope Clement I (first century) to buttress his argument. Such a forgery could hardly have been made for hope of earthly reward (p. 540). The historians also precluded simple ignorance. Whole rings of forgers were turned up in the twelfth century, so many by the time of Innocent III, that the pope undertook to put a stop to it with a revision of the "cursus," the supposedly secret, regular rhythmic prose conclusions of lines of curial documents and the papal seal on the bulla. It didnt work (pp. 546-47).
The discussions among the German historians at Duisburg, interestingly enough, recurrently appealed to the notion of "restoration" in their attempt to explain the forces at work in the minds of the forgers. Old law was good law. The forger was merely attempting to restore on the basis of ancient authority the just conditions that then prevailed (pp. 539-40). This might have happened in understandable, concrete situations where the old law was oral and never written down and had, all of a sudden, to compete with a new law that was written down. It was the same as if a document had been lost by catastrophe and needed restoration. (Consider how the Sibyllinic books, which were housed in the Capitolium had to be reconstructed after the Gallic burning of the Capitol in Rome in 83 B.C.)
The historians at Duisburg suggested that the purpose of intellectual labor in the Middle Ages was to make Gods will known to man, that this was also the motive of the forger, making Gods will known by restoring "right order" (p. 543). The medieval poet, they suggested, knew that he did not write out of his own genius but rather wrote down what God told him to write down -- for which task God might just as well have picked someone else (p. 542).
It is fairly certain that the Middle Ages lacked the means for detemining a forgery when it came along. Both the Lex Ripuaria and an Ottonian law decree trial by duel or ordeal as a means of detemining the authenticity of a disputed document (p. 592). Medieval critics of the Pseudo-Isidorean decretals observed anachronisms in them but were unable to draw consequences from those observations. They criticized the documents on the grounds of content, as Dante and Cusanus were later to object to the Donation of Constantine (p. 548).
When scientific means eventually did become available, they were applied with merciless consistency to documents of which one did not approve. Who knows, we might still be writing counter forgeries if Lorenzo Valla had not had an ax to grind with the pretension of papal authority (pp. 550-51). Neither did Lorenzos critical powers spread so far or so fast as a modern cheering section might wish. Perfectly respectable, uncritical, that is, quite fantastic history was still being written in Italy, published, and devoured by the reading public as late as the early sixteenth century. Consider Jacopo Foresta, whose traditional chronicles are, however, interesting for another reason, viz., the inclusion of poets and scholars, a novum, along with the usual princes, popes, and emperors.17
Forestas chronicles are a chief source for the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493. There all manner of emperors from the first Caesars across the Carolingians, Ottonians, and Hohenstaufen look remarkably like Frederick III Hapsburg and incline to wear a crown that was not fashioned until the fifteenth century. The principle of anachronism had certainly not reached the studio of Wolgemuth, nor for that matter, the study of Hartmann Schedel who compiled the chronicle and otherwise seems to quality as a humanist.18
I mention this episode in the context of Foresta and Schedel -- one could easily throw in Enea Silvio -- to show that the disparities in historical understanding were, at the end of the Middle Ages, such that one must be exceedingly cautious about making confident generalizations concerning the dawn of modern historical understanding. Some people had it some of the time (Bruni); some people had it all the time (Valla); some people obviously didn't care (Enea Silvio). And the general popular understanding, from emperors down to city chroniclers, was far from wary or suspicious. As much as anyone else, they had a great thirst for antiquities, for origins. And if these were not provided one way, well, they could be provided another.
It is some such motivation which brought on the scene a pair of remarkable documents of considerable notoriety in their time: They are first: the Berosus forgery of Annius of Viterbo (Giovanni Nanni); second, the Hunibald forgery of Johannes Trithemius.
There was in fact once a Beros(s)us, a Greek writer born in Bithynia and a priest of Belus (= Marduk?). He lived as early as the time of Alexander the Great to about 280 B.C. He wrote three books of histories called variously Babylonica and Chaldaica. Though they have perished, they were well thought of in antiquity, being the ancient priestly chronicles of the temple of Belus in Babylon; and numerous fragments appear in the works of later classical and patristic authors.19
Giovanni Nanni was a Dominican of Viterbo and occasional librarian for Pope Alexander VI Borgia. Nanni had an intense, one must imagine, pathological dislike of Greeks, and wrote a considerable text, based supposedly on the lost books of Berosus, supplemented by the Persian chronicler Metasthenes (a misreading of "Megasthenes") and the lost books of Manetho (a third-century B.C. Egyptian priest whose works also survive in fragments and have been shown in modern times by hieroglyphic finds to have been reliable).20 Nanni published the forgery in Rome in 1494 and dedicated it to Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain. He wrote the work, apparently, to show that all the peoples of Europe had antiquities independent of the Greeks and far more interesting. He asserts, for example, that the Celts brought the art of letters to the Greeks.21 He begins his preface to the general reader with exceptional gall, assuring us that as a theologian he has an especial duty to respect the truth: Theologi officium est, rerum veritatem . . . spectat (sig. *5r). Overall, his work is an attempt to write a harmony of biblical and Greco-Roman mythologies, filling in the blanks with his imaginationm and what reputable history came his way: he is among the first moderns to know Tacitus well enough to plunder him. The overlap with Tacitus gave Nannis forgery enormous authority in the German north. His works were often reprinted and did not fully fall out of favor until the seventeenth century.22
The second fraud I should like to mention is the Abbot Johannes Trithemius who was born in 1464. He was a theologian, moralist, antiquarian, bibliophile, and would have liked to be a mystic and a magician.23 His many faults included the generation of an enormous fraud, the history of the Franks from the Fall of Troy up to and not particularly including Clovis, precisely that part of their history which does not exit, in part because they did not exist, certainly not as Franks. He claimed to have found a manuscript of the ancient Frankish historian Hunibald, who himself had lifted the writings of Wastaldus, an even more ancient Frankish historian. The history is quite detailed and anecdotal, far more like Saxo Grammaticus and Geoffrey of Monmouth (whom he pickpockets for Hunibald) than Nannis more chronicle-like forgery.24
Trithemius had made some remarkable genealogical claims for Emperor Maximilian I, with whom he was on good terms. These traced the Habsburg back to Noah. If any of you know Maximilians tomb at Innsbruck (in which he is, however, not buried, since he was squabbling with the Tyrolians when he died), you will recall Peter Fischers fine bronzes of Maximilians ancestors, who include Theodoric and King Arthur.25 When called upon to document his extraordinary claims for Kaiser Max, Trithemius appealed to Hunibald (Arnold, pp. 167-69). Maximilian pleaded for the original Hunibald manuscript. A decade or so earlier, his dissolute monks had driven Trithemius from his abbey at Sponheim for being far too strict and pious. He had now to use the escape as an excuse for claiming that the manuscript had been lost. In 1514, to make up for the loss he wrote down his history of the origin of the Franks, and foolishly sent it out for publication to Schoeffer in Mainz (1515).
A nasty and clever cartoon, drawn at court by Trithemiuss enemy Stabius, demonstrates that his work was well known there and not thought much of (Arnold, p. 170). Others also attacked it in his lifetime, which mercifully was only to last another year. He died in Würzburg in 1516, defending himself against charges of forgery, fraud, and black magic from as far away as Vienna and Paris.26 Tilmann Riemenschneider carved his tombstone.
Trithemius observed the highly topological, rhetorical conventions confining the prefaces of expository works in the medieval tradition.27 He appeals to a rare topos by requesting of his reader an especially close reading of his text and a withholding of criticism until it has been examined prudently: monemus lectore, ne prius carpat opus, quam prudenter examinet (p. 2). Anticipating criticism and trying to ward it off are conventional; explicitly requesting a prudent reading is less so and seems to apply to works potentially controversial.
In another large scale work, the Annales Hirsaugienses of 1509 to 1514, Trithemius occasionally perpetrates a small fraud, invents an authority, refers to Hunibald, but by and large, the work is traditional compilatory history in the medieval tradition when it deals with the known past, and extremely interesting firsthand reporting when it deals with the present. Trithemius had dined at the Emperors table during an imperial diet in Frankfurt and followed Elector Joachim of Brandenburg back to Berlin from the diet. Elector Joachim was a classic case of the modern territorial prince in Germany, determined to put an end to the liberties of the cities and especially to those of the nobility.28 Although Trithemius had an acute sense of history in certain respects, he was far too close to these events to evaluate them objectively.
He admiringly tells a story of a powerful noble family with which the Elector had come into feud. It turns out that a felonious son of this family had been condemned to death by the Electors courts. The family had intervened with the elector in behalf of the son and fully expected a reprieve. The Elector refused to grant it, saying "it is not I but the law which your son violated which puts him to death."29
Well into his forgery of the early history of the Franks, Trithemius introduces a remarkable monarch by the name of Basanus. Trithemius ascribes to this fictitious king a quantity of memorable deeds, not least of which, his refusal to overturn a legal condemnation of his own son. When Basanuss queen, the mother of the convict intervened in his behalf, fully expecting a reprieve, Basan refused it saying "it is not I but the law which your son violated which puts him to death.30 The possibility that Trithemius was writing, among other things, an histoire a clef cannot be excluded.
A century or so after Trithemius, well into the Baroque, when the prose epic, the novel, began to give signs of turning recognizably modern -- a new genre -- it was the custom in certain kinds of novels to adorn the text with learned marginalia, the equivalent of footnotes. On the page, the text was indistinguishable at first glance from proper historical works, those that did not pretend to be fiction. A little later in the seventeenth century we find a massive novel of some 5,000 pages called Ermines und Thusnelda. It is set more or less in 9 A.D., at the time of Hermann the German's defeat of Quintilius Varus and the annihilation of his three legions (Quintili Vare, legiones redde!). In point of fact, it is a lengthy historical reflection on the course of Hapsburg politics in the seventeenth century and requires a clef to make any sense at all.31 Whether any modern historian of the seventeenth century has ever had the courage to tackle the novel for data I do not know.
The genre simply did not exist in the time of Annius and Trithemius, and I wonder whether their historical fictions are not a small but valid step in its direction. What exactly was or may have been the concept of time and history, of fiction and the heroic past, of origins and heritage at this moment or that in our long tradition may never be wholly knowable. But it seems a duty to inquire.
ENDNOTES
1 On general questions of authorship in semitic and hellenic antiquity see: P.R. Ackroyd and C.F. Evans, The Cambridge History of the Bible, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 1, 38-40; H. Peter, Wahrheit und Kunst: Geschichtsschreibung und Plagiat im klassischen Altertum (Leipzig: Teubner, 1911), pp. 8-14, 416-429.
2 Pierre Le Gentil, The Chanson de Roland, Frances F. Beer, trans. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 54-75. Gustav Ehrismann, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, 2 vols. in 4 parts (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1955-1959), ii, i, 284-290; John Mavrogordato, ed., Digenes Akrites, (Oxford: At the Clarendon, 1956), pp. XVI-XIX.
3 The modern history of religion betrays a great reluctance to interpret the pseudonymity of troublesome texts as a deceit: Acroyd and Evans, I, 132-33.
4 Alfons Kurfess, ed. & trans., Sibyllinische Weissagungen (Munich: Heimeran, 1951), pp. 15-16, 19-22; instances of Judaeo-hellenistic synchresis: pp. 35-49. See also, Aureio Pretti, La sibila Babilone nela propaganda ellenistica, Biblioteca di cultura, 21 (Florence: `La nuova Italia", 1943).
5 Walter Scott, ed., Hermetica, 4 vols. (Oxford: At the Clarendon, 1924-1936), I, 2-8; A.D. Nock and A.-J. Festugiere, Corpus Hermeticum, 1st & 2nd editions (Paris: "Les belles Lettres", 1954-60), III, pp. iii-viii.
6 D.P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella, Studies of the Warburg Institute, 22 (London: Warburg, 1958), pp. 90-96; Lynne Thorndike, History of Magic and experimental Science, 8 vols. (New York: Macmillan and Columbia University Press, 1923-58), IV, 517-524.
7 C.E. Rolf, trans., Dionysius the Areopagite: On the Divine Names and the Mystical Theology (London: Macmillan, 1920), p. 3.
8 Martin Not, "Die Historisierung des Mythos in Alten Testament," Gesammelte Studien zum alten Testament, 2 vols., Theologische Bücherei, 6 & 39 (Munich: Chr. Kaiser, 1957-69), II, 27-47, esp. p. 47.
9 R.L.P. Milburn, Early Christian Interpretations of History, (London: A. & C. Black: 1954).
10 Hermann Gunkel, Schöpfung und Chaos in Urzeit und Endzeit (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1895), p. 369.
11 E.J.Bickermann, "Origines gentium," Classical Philology, 47 (1952), 65-69.
12 Siegmund Hellmann, "Das Fredegar-Problem," Ausgewählte Abhandlungen zur Historiographie und Geistesgeschichte dee Mittelalters (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1961), p. 151; Hildebrecht Hommel, "Die trojanische Herkunft der Franken," Rheinisches Museum, N.F. 99 (1956), 323-28.
13 Robert W. Hanning, The Vision of History in Early Britain (New York: Columbia Univestity Press, 1966), pp. 156-58.
14 See the author's German Antiquity in Renaissance Myth (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), pp. 213, 226-29.
15 Rudolf Jahncke, Guilielmus Neubrigensis, Jenaer Historische Arbeiten, 1 (Bonn: Marcus & Weber, 1912), pp. 24-27.
16 Horst Fuhrmann, Karl BosI, Hans Patzke, and August Nitschke, "Die Fälschungen im Mittelalter: Überlegungen zum mittelalterlichen Wahrheitsbegriff," Historische Zeitschrift, 197 (1963), 529-601.
17 See Borchardt (supra note 14), pp. 77-80.
18 Buoch der Croniken (Nürnberg: Koburger, 1493), fols. XCIr, CLXVIIr-CLXXXIr, CCIIIr, CCIXr, CCLXVIIIv .
19 Jonathan Z. Smith, "Wisdom and Apocalyptic," Visionaries and their Apocalypses, Paul D. Hanson, ed. (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1983), pp. 102-3.
20 Edoardo Fumagalli, "Un Falso tardo-quattrocentesco: lo Pseudo-Catone di Annio da Viterbo," in Vestigia: Studi in onore di Giuseppe Billanovich, 2 vols. Storia e Letteratura, 162-163 (Rome: Edizione di Storia e Letteratura, 1984), 1, 351, note 36.
21 I use the edition Berosi... Antiquitatum... libri quinque (Antwerpen: Johanns Steelius, 1552), pp. 42, 129.
22 Paul Joachimsen, Geschichtsauffassung und Geschichtschreibung in Deutschland unter dem Einfluss des Humanism us, Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance, 6 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1910), pp. 160-63.
23 Klaus Arnold, Johannes Trithemius (1462-1516), Quellen und Forschungen zur Geschichte des Bistums und Hochstifts Würzburg, 23 (Würzburg: Schöningh, 1971), pp. 221-223; see also the author's "Trithemius and the Mask of Janus," Traditions and Transitions: Studies in Honor of Harold Jantz (Munich: Delp, 1972), pp. 37-49.
24 Marquard Freher, Johannis Trithemii... Opera Historica (Franckfurt/Main: Wechel, 1601), rpt. 1969), 2 vols., 1, 1-99.
25 Vinzens Oberhammer, Die Bronze-Statuen am Grabmal Maximilians (Innsbruck: Alpenverlag, 1943), pp. 9, 58-61.
26 Klaus Arnold, "Ergänzungen zum Briefwechsel des Johannes Trithemius," Studien und Mitteilungen zur Geschichte des Benediktiner-Ordens, 83 (1972), 203.
27 Gertrud Simon, "Untersuchungen zur Topik des Widmungsbriefe mittelalterlicher Geschichtsschreiber bis zum Ende des 12. Jahrhunderts," Archiv für Diplomatik, 4 (1958), 88, and 5/6 (1959/60), 118.
28 K.E. Hermann Muller, Über das Verhältnis des Abtes Trithemius zu Joachim I. von Brandenburg (Prenzlau, 1874), p. 8.
29 Joannis Trithemii . . . , Tomus I (Tomus II) Annalium Hirsaugiensium (St. Gall: J.G. Schlegel, 1690), 2, 631-32.
30 Freher, 1, 7-9.
31 Leo Cholevius, Die bedeutendsten deutschen Romane des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (rpt. Stuttgart: Teubner, 1965), pp. 313-321.