HIST-308 Lecture Notes - Lecture 35: Saint-Pierre-De-Fursac
16 Nov 2020
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Document Summary
Some readers may be surprised to find devout ecclesiastical reformers engaged in wholesale lying. Poets everywhere scribbled mediocre verses and ascribed them to virgil and horace. Historians waged wars on their pages that never occurred in life. Would-be philosophers and theologians wrote volumes of nonsense and placed cicero"s or st. The most tireless forger of all, ademar of chabannes, even altered the holy gospels by inserting the name of his favorite saint, the third-century st. Martial, into the text as one of christ"s original twelve apostles. Some scholars have estimated that as much as fifteen percent of the writing that survives from the mid-ninth to the mideleventh centuries is either completely or partially faked. If what a document said was true, then the document was in fact a true one. Therefore, there was no dishonesty even in inventing letters for unknowns like telesphorus i. Decretals proved to be a highly effective weapon.
