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Others took up similarly specialized approaches in this almost entirely commodified enterprise, and we are sometimes blessed to know precisely who created them. One singular case includes an example of the somewhat crude but nevertheless successful forgeries of “ancient” Greek manuscripts by Constantine Simonides, who fooled several major collectors into paying substantial sums for his wares during the forger’s various bookselling visits to London in the 1850s and 1860s. Among his principal victims were the Liverpool collector Joseph Mayer and the most energetic and monomaniacal early manuscripts collector of the age, Sir Thomas Phillipps. Phillipps acquired several impossibly rare ancient Greek manuscript fragments from Simonides, among them an example of the aforementioned “Letter of Aristeas,” and others professed to be by Hesiod and even Homer himself, all of them fakes. Phillipps’s fourth wellknown purchase is now a part of the Bibliotheca Fictiva, a manuscript codex in Greek minuscule written on artificially aged vellum. It professes to preserve a “lost” history of Byzantine painting attributed to Meletios, a monk of Chios, who was supposed to have composed the manuscript on Mount Athos. Meant to be ancient, it was in fact a product of Simonides’s own fertile imagination and native command of Greek. This spectacular effort to fill one of the greatest gaping holes in the history of art is truly unique and original, for it appears, barring further investigation to the contrary, to have been composed entirely by Simonides himself. To date, this manuscript in the Bibliotheca Fictiva has received little serious scholarly attention.56 A final example of this colorful and audacious class of later autograph manuscript forgery marks the active career of the late-nineteenth-century Hermann Kyrieleis, who took up a special trade in the production of manuscript documents written, or at least signed, by the first generation of Protestant Reformers, most notably Martin Luther. Appealing in particular to the confessional patriotism of any Lutheran or, for that matter, of any Protestant with antiquarian interests, Kyrieleis offered irresistible treasures. These were no mere autographed bills, receipts, or mundane consistory reports, but rich and sometimes revelatory compositions, some replete with biographical details, others presenting the most intimate of glosses by the great Reformers regarding the fundamental tenets of reformed evangelical theology. Among the latter class of materials is an object far too good to be true: a twenty-seven-line poem written and signed in Luther’s autograph, a contemplation of the Lord’s Prayer, one of the most fundamental dogmatic formularies of the Christian tradition.57 To personalize the presentation, it is inscribed to a Jacob Dolly at Wittenberg,
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1529. Though the identity of the recipient is perhaps obscure, the date given to the manuscript is certainly not insignificant, for it was in that same year, perhaps more than any other single year, that reformed catechizing was on Luther’s mind. It was in 1529 that Luther composed his Large Catechism for parish clergy, and a much simpler Small Catechism for the laity, providing extensive and systematic Lutheran expositions of the Ten Commandments, the Apostles’ Creed, and of course, the Lord’s Prayer. Despite this personal juxtaposition of Luther’s little-known poetic powers to his contemporaneous dedication in 1529 to making the fundamental tenets of Lutheranism accessible to the broadest audiences, Kyrieleis could not resist gilding this lily as well. And so today this one manuscript leaf appears in the Bibliotheca Fictiva oddly tipped into a handsome leather binding that, in its own right, should stand as a clarion endorsement of the authenticity of the artifact it was made artificially to contain (the binding was clearly repurposed, having formerly held a slightly thicker, pamphlet-sized printed work replaced with Luther’s manuscript leaf). This authentic, late-sixteenth-century binding bears one of several of the personal gilt armorials employed by the eminent book collector and discriminating French historian of his own times, Jacques Auguste de Thou. Unfortunately for Kyrieleis, his career as a forger was not only exposed early on, but also well documented, including a printed inventory that contains an entry for this same “On the Lord’s Prayer” autograph poem, written by the Bibliotheca Fictiva’s very own “Martin Luther.” It is simply impossible to capture the full contours, breadth, and forensic sophistication of the Bibliotheca Fictiva in the space of a single essay, or even within an entire volume inspired by its contents. What has been presented here may at least provide an informative overview of the broader collection and a slightly more nuanced sense of the multifaceted contours of the greater “House of Forgery” that it represents. That now familiar term was first coined by Horace Walpole during the Thomas Chatterton affair, arguably the apex (alongside “Ossian”) of popular eighteenth-century English literary forgery that, ironically, secured for the young forger his apotheosis as the proverbial poet crying out into the wilderness.58 (Beloved by those more eager to remember him as an innocent victim of Walpole’s presumed snobbery and aristocratic indifference than as the forger of the mock-medieval Thomas Rowley poems, Chatterton’s famously indignant autograph letter concluding his failed solicitation of Walpole’s literary patronage also constitutes a high point in the Bibliotheca Fictiva collection.) The House of Forgery nonetheless presents an archi-
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