Forgeries and Their Social Circulation in the Context of Historical Culture: The Usable Past as a Resource for Social Advance in Early Modern Lemberg/Lviv

Abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to put the charter – for a long time seen as simply forgery – into a wider context of historical culture of the epoch. It also aims to investigate motive, means, and opportunity, as used by the social actors – the forgers. The examination of the forgeries not only uncovers the historical imagination of their producers but also helps our better understanding of the historical culture of the epoch and its social circulation in a given society. The study of “Prince Fedor’s charter of 1062” examines how urban elites accepted the noblemen’s political and historical culture and used it for their own purposes. The author of the paper examines how the social aspirations and dominant cultural framework in the host society influenced the wealthy Armenian Diaspora to promote some possible options of the usable past and to abandon other ones. Finally, it shows how the elements of all these options were combined into a new narrative in the nineteenth century, in accordance with the historical culture of Romantic nationalism.