Editors’ introduction: Medieval Forgeries / Forging the Medieval

Abstract

Fakes and forgeries capture the imagination like little else, and once embedded in the public and academic consciousness they tend to be the subject of intense and recurring debate. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson had already firmly quashed any notion of the epic Ossian being the ancient poem that its 'translator'-in fact, its author-James Macpherson had claimed it to be (Johnson and Boswell 2020, 96); but Magnus Linklater's 2021 review of John McShane's modernised edition ran with the headline, 'What if the hoax of Ossian is true after all?' (Linklater 2021). Striking a similar tone is the headline of a New European article from 2023: 'Is the Turin Shroud real after all?' (Totaro 2023), a question posed amidst the careful neutrality of the Catholic Editors' introduction: Medieval Forgeries / Forging the Medieval