This volume looks at suspicious activities, objects, and writings and asks not only if they are truly fraudulent, but also if they proved scientifically or socially useful. It starts with astronomy. Ptolemy’s data was already questioned in the early modern period because he ignored inconvenient planetary positions and copied observations from earlier astronomers. In “File Down the Data! Data Treatment Procedures and False Positives for Fakes in Ptolemy’s Almagest,” Giorgio Strano concentrates on Ptolemy, who has come under withering attack in modern times, and absolves him. Strano accuses the detractors of ignoring the importance of tradition in earlier times and the fact that scientists still select the most useful data. In “Is Doctoring Always Misconduct? Case Studies: Ptolemy, Copernicus, Lansbergen,” Owen Gingerich also absolves Ptolemy of fraud, as well as Copernicus, who engaged in similar activities. He is less forgiving of the Dutch astronomer Philips Lansbergen, whose doctored planetary tables hindered the acceptance of Johannes Kepler’s more accurate tables because Kepler’s were so much more complex.
Surely the alchemist is a likely perpetrator of fraud, yet even the most suspect part of alchemy, turning base metal into precious metal, must remain hearsay because, as Didier Kahn reminds us in “The Significance of Transmutation in Early Modern Alchemy: The Case of Thurneysser’s Half-gold Nail,” the incontrovertible chemical proof that the specimen is gold would dissolve the gold. In “Transmutations and Frauds in Enlightened Paris: Lavoisier and Alchemy,” Marco Bereta notes that Antoine Lavoisier, who established the modern science of chemistry, first published a paper on alchemy, one that nevertheless established the boundaries of chemical research and the methodology of quantification that enabled him to overthrow the alchemical tradition of transmutation. In “Coloring Topaz, Crystal and Moonstone: Factitious Gems and the Imitation of Art and Nature, 300–1500,” Marjoljin Bol describes her own attempts to create fake gems but considers it a fair enterprise as long as the maker did not try to pass it off as real. She reminds us that Albertus Magnus considered making fake gems a means to duplicate and thereby study nature.
As natural history developed as a topic of inquiry in early modern science, new imaginative species were added to the old. In “Divers, Sirens and Fishes: The Anatomy of Underwater Creatures,” Maria Conforti looks at texts about humanoid marine life and how anatomists used specimens and reports to gather data and contributed to the development of the science of animal anatomy by studying their anatomy and physiology. In “Contrivances of Art: The Power of Imagery in the Early Modern Culture of Curiosity,” Alessandro Tosi points out that the French physician Pierre Borel’s Wunderkammer (curiosity cabinet) contained oddities (bone of giant, piece of unicorn horn, claws and tooth of dragon, basilisk), though he warned against falsifications he learned about through contacts with an Italian fabricator. Such contacts, Tosi maintained, encouraged research on teratology, collections, and charlatanism. In “Athanasius Kircher’s Palingenetic Plant,” Ingrid D. Rowland suggests that the belief in this plant was important for Kircher’s general theory of panspermia rerum, but he still encouraged the need to experiment and duplicate work. In “Certain Fakes and Uncertain Facts: Jan Jonston and the Question of Truth in Religion and Natural History,” Dániel Margócsy shows that this Scottish-Polish physician, an author of an encyclopedia of natural history, was not concerned with certain evidence, not only because of the variability of nature, but because his millenarian beliefs led him to find historical facts inherently unstable before the rule of saints.
Finally we come to science and art. In “An Original Fake: Closing the Debate on Flammarion’s Engraving,” Stefano Gattei examines the woodcut published by Nicolas Camille Flammarion in 1888, which he claimed was from the Middle Ages and whose authenticity has been debated, and determines that it was, in fact, a nineteenth-century imitation of sixteenth- or seventeenth-century engraving.
Taken together, these papers show that not all fakes are truly fakes, and even the truly fraudulent can prove useful to understanding the history of science. This is a start. More work needs to be done.
