Author: Levi Roach

Forgery and Memory at the End of the First Millennium takes a fresh look at documentary forgery and historical memory in the Middle Ages.
In the 10th and 11th centuries, religious houses across Europe began falsifying texts to improve local documentary records on an unprecedented scale.
As Levi Roach illustrates, the resulting wave of forgery signaled major shifts in society and political culture, shifts which would lay the foundations for the European ancien régime, says a review on the Princeton University website.
Spanning documentary traditions across France, England, Germany and northern Italy,
Roach examines five sets of falsified texts to demonstrate how forged records produced in this period gave voice to new collective identities within and beyond the Church.
Above all, he indicates how this fad for falsification points to new attitudes toward past and present — a developing fascination with the signs of antiquity.