Fake news has always existed and probably always will. The problem of distinguishing correct from false depends on one's ability to trace back the origin of the information and its moment of transformation into fake. Yet if we look at the matter from the faker's viewpoint, the problem is how not to leave traces that will allow an identification of the fake, or, worse, fingerprints that will lead the readers to him. The Opinione di fra Paolo Sarpi is a fake text whose first part was probably written in Venice in 1615, followed by a second one assembled in the 1640s from different sources. It later circulated in manuscript form until its first printed edition in 1681, to be reedited in numerous ones until the end of the eighteenth century. The work's history contains all the ingredients of a mystery novel worth the attention of authors like Umberto Eco, and, moreover, it invites us to think of the reason for our long-standing attraction to fake texts, while we soon lose interest in the true-to-history ones.

This critical edition of Le Prince de Fra Paolo by Romain Borgna is divided into two parts. The first, a long introduction of 134 pages, contains three chapters that discuss the history of the text's circulation; its historiography, mythology, and the text; and the relationship between the work and the Venetian patriciate's ideology. The second part is the critical edition of the French translations of the Opinione. In the helpful introduction, Borgna offers a fascinating journey from Venice to France through textual manipulations, revisions, corrections, and translations of the original text. After a short synthesis, based on other scholars’ publications, of the circumstances that gave birth to the text and its codification, Borgna arrives at the conclusion that “the search for the authorship of the work is not an absolute priority. It does not matter who the author was, as the ideology presented in the work is clearly identifiable” (25). In fact, it has already been long hypothesized that all leads point to the Venetian political faction of the Giovani (The Young) and their libertine successors at the Accademia degli Incogniti (Academy of the Unknowns), who, challenging the reason-of-state ideology, became specialists in disseminating fake news through their historiographic and pseudo-newsletter publications. The disinformation does not lie in the contents of the text itself but rather in its attribution to Paolo Sarpi, the Venetian Machiavellian prelate who had defied the papal interdict against Venice (1605–07): Sarpi's name had become a guarantee for a rapid dissemination of the work considered to be the new Machiavelli's The Prince.

The fascination for Sarpi as the new Machiavelli lies in the decision taken by the abbot François-Marie de Marsy, a former Jesuit with literary aspirations, to publish in 1751 his translated French version of the Italian text in Berlin under the name of “The Prince of fra Paolo or Political Advice Addressed to the Venetian Nobility.” As explicitly stated by the abbot in his preface, in giving the work a Machiavellian title, he was inspired by the work itself: “a masterpiece of politics” (138). Indeed, it would seem strange to translate almost seventy years after its first appearance in print a work already publicly declared as a “false attribution” (on the title page of the 1685 edition), and, moreover, publish in Prussian Berlin under Frederick the Great a text that strives to undermine the very idea of the reason-of-state ideology. Yet in order to contextualize the abbot de Marsy's fascination for Sarpi's work, Borgna argues persuasively that precisely in states where there existed a long-term multiconfessional conflict or a strong jurisdictional stance (as in Gallican France), the curiosity toward Sarpi's writings (and especially the fake work) had been rather elevated during the eighteenth century due to the text's subtlety in touching upon these themes.

The book is indeed an important contribution to unfolding the secret of the success of Sarpi's writings, especially the ones attributed to him. The Venetian Machiavellian prelate still fascinates with his ideas—true or false as they may be.