Forgery Cases Research Articles

The <I>Xinshu</I> 新書 Reexamined: An Emphasis on Usability over Authenticity

A collection of texts conventionally ascribed to Jia Yi 賈誼 (200-168 BC), the Xinshu 新書 has been subjected to an ages-long debate regarding its authenticity. The present study disclaims the discovery of any adequate evidence to prove the text trustworthy; but it finds the arguments for its forgery ill founded. Rather than present merely an account of this dilemma or attempt to corroborate either position in the debate, this paper argues against the approach in textual criticism that views early texts through a dualistic prism of authenticity vs. forgery. A case of forgery should be established upon no less concrete evidence than should one of authenticity. The mere lack of positive evidence can hardly be regarded or used as any negative evidence to disprove a text. Given the dilemma, the paper suggests treating the Xinshu nonetheless as a workable and even currently reliable source for our study of Jia Yi until that very day dawns upon us with any unequivocal evidence of its forgery detected or, better still, excavated.

Reading royalty in Dumas’ Le Collier de la reine

Capitalizing on the historical trend of Realist novels, Alexandre Dumas père published his Le Collier de la reine in 1849–1850. The novel dramatizes a factual case of fraud, forgery, and royal impersonation that shook the Ancien Régime in 1785. Dumas locates at the centre of his intrigue the figure of the queen (Marie-Antoinette), and shows how a series of public misinterpretations of the royal person actually contribute to the monarchy's downfall and the Revolution of 1789. I argue that Dumas uses the historical setting as a screen for his veiled comments on the contemporary political events of 1848–1850, a period fraught with yet another revolution, two failed regimes and the advent of Napoléon III's dictatorship (to which Dumas, like other republican authors of the time, was opposed). By casting his focus on the paradoxes of revelation and concealment around the person of the queen's impersonator in 1785, Dumas subtly and concurrently questions acts of cultural hierophany in the France of 1850, thereby calling attention to the fragility of both the republic and the whole idea of leadership itself.

Art and authenticity: The importance of originals in judgments of value.

Why are original artworks valued more than identical duplicates? The present studies explore 2 mechanisms underlying the special value of original artwork: the assessment of the art object as a unique creative act (performance) and the degree of physical contact with the original artist (contagion). Across 5 experiments, participants were exposed to hypothetical scenarios in which an original object was duplicated. The type of object varied across experiments (e.g., a painting vs. a piece of furniture) as did the circumstances surrounding the creation of the original object and the duplicate. Overall, the results support assessments of performance and contagion as key factors underlying the value of original artwork, and they are consistent with the conclusion that the discrepancy in value between original artworks and perfect duplicates derives from people's lay theories about the domain of art, rather than from associations with particular kinds of art or certain cases of forgery.

Metropolitan Clerks and Venality in Qing China: The Great 1830 Forgery Case

AbstractThis study of a forgery case in the Board of Revenue shows how the huge increase in the legal sale of offices and titles in early nineteenth-century China overstretched the bureaucratic structures that managed it and exposed the weakness of official control over subaltern clerical personnel. The case allows a glimpse into the mostly hidden world of metropolitan clerks and the operation of a little known department in the Board of Revenue, the Contribution Office. It also demonstrates how the illegal sale of fake official ranks allowed the clerks to participate in the legal purchase of offices and thus to free themselves from the predicament of their clerical position. While legal venality contributed to general corruption in the Qing bureaucracy, it also leveled to a certain extent the differences between a professional yet suppressed class of bureaucrats and their amateurish yet socially esteemed scholar-literati superiors.

O pieczęciach starosty generalnego Wielkopolski Adama Sędziwoja Czarnkowskiego

Adam Sędziwój Czarnkowski descended from an old noble family with origins in Grand Poland that can be traced back to at least the first half of the fourteenth century. He belonged to the younger family line started by Sędziwój Czarnkowski, the castellan of Przemęt (his brother, Maciej, is considered to be the progenitor of the older line), a son of Sędziwój, the voivode of the Poznań, and a grandson of Jan, the castellan of Gniezno. Adam was a grandson of Sędziwój and a son of Wojciech Sędziwój Czarnkowski, the general starost of Grand Poland, and Jadwiga Sierpska from Gulczewo of the Prawdzic coat-of-arms, the daughter of the voivode of Rawa. As a reward for his contribution to the wars with Russia, he was appointed the starost of Pyzdry by King Stefan Batory in 1579. At the same time, he inherited the title of the commander of the Knights of Saint John in Poznań (komandor poznańskich joannitów) from his father. During the reign of king Sigismunt III, he was a supporter of the king. It was during that time that his career proceeded quickly: in 1593 he became the general starost of Grand Poland, and in 1606 he was appointed the voivode of Łęczyca. Not all of Adam Sędziwój Czarnkowski's seals survived to this day, but those remaining allow the analysis of the sigillographic collection of one of the oligarchs of Grand Poland. This collection, however, is specific. It seems to be unusually numerous when compared to the seal collections that belonged to other, even the richest, noblemen. That is because Czarnkowski's collection included official seals necessary to carry out the duties of the general starost and other, lower posts, e.g. those related to governing a castle court and office (urząd grodzki), as well as personal seals, which can be divided into several sub-categories. The collection grew mostly because Czarnkowski held the office of the general starost of Grand Poland and this required using seven, out of nine, known types of Czarnkowski's seals. It shows to what a great extent the seal collections of noblemen were influenced by the offices they held. It also allows the author to state that a seal collection of a nobleman reflected his social status and the amount of offices he held. The images and inscriptions on Czarnkowski's seals were part of the communication system present in Poland at the time. The words inscribed in the seals not only allowed the identification of an official but also his competence. This became particularly important after the judicial reform (reforma sądownictwa grodzkiego) in Grand Poland, when the competence of the deputy starost of Kalisz and Poznań covered only selected districts. However, it was the coat-of-arms that was the main medium for conveying information and that allowed the transferring of quite complex messages. Because Czarnkowski's seals functioned on the verge of the private and public spheres, they not only provide a lot of information about the history of the starost office, but through their images they also give us an insight into the world of ideology of the nobility and its related symbols. In this case, the coat-of-arms on Adam Sędziwój Czarnkowski's seals helped encode the legend of this version of the Nałęcz coat-of-arms that was used by his family. Its design emerged probably around the first half of the sixteenth century and had something to do with the case of forgeries (czarnkowskie falsyfikaty). However, the images on the seal can be also interpreted as referring to the aspirations of the magnate who, according to a legend, had royal ancestors and began to think of himself as a prince as well.

The Piltdown Skull Site: the rise and fall of Britain's first geological National Nature Reserve and its place in the history of nature conservation

The Piltdown hoax is one of the best known cases of scientific forgery in the world and has been the subject of hundreds of papers, books, articles, press reports and web-pages. Whilst the story of the hoax has secured a place in history, the pioneering role played by the site of the Piltdown ‘finds’, the Piltdown Skull Site, in the early days of British nature conservation has been forgotten. This paper describes how the Piltdown Skull Site in East Sussex, England, a site now known to be of little or no scientific importance, almost became Britain's first National Nature Reserve (NNR), and how, in 1952, it did become Britain's first geological NNR. It describes how the newly formed Nature Conservancy (NC) and the British Museum (Natural History) (BM(NH)) worked together at Piltdown to undertake innovative site management that played a part in exposing the hoax and describes what happened to the NNR as the details of the forgery emerged. Although the NC was clearly embarrassed by the NNR once the hoax was revealed, it is argued here that there was little to be ashamed of and much to be commended.

Romanticism and Forgery

AbstractSeveral literary forgers emerged in the later eighteenth century: notably James Macpherson (Ossian), Thomas Chatterton (Thomas Rowley) and William Henry Ireland (the Shakespeare forger). These cases of literary forgery were highly controversial at the time, and had a lasting impact on the Romantic movement, particularly in the understanding of authenticity, inspiration and the figure of the poet, although by this time plagiarism, hoaxing and impersonation had superseded forgery – most clearly in the cases of Princess Caraboo, Joanna Southcott and the seduction of the Maid of Buttermere. Serious critical attention to both forgers and impostors has dramatically increased in recent years, with feminist, post‐colonial and psychoanalytic readings. Cases of writers of ‘fakelit’ also have serious implications for criticism today.

Appropriation and Authorship in Contemporary Art

Appropriation art has often been thought to support the view that authorship in art is an outmoded or misguided notion. Through a thought experiment comparing appropriation art to a unique case of artistic forgery, I examine and reject a number of candidates for the distinction that makes artists the authors of their work while forgers are not. The crucial difference is seen to lie in the fact that artists bear ultimate responsibility for whatever objectives they choose to pursue through their work, whereas the forger's central objectives are determined by the nature of the activity of forgery. Appropriation artists, by revealing that no aspect of the objectives an artist pursues are in fact built in to the concept of art, demonstrate artists' responsibility for all aspects of their objectives and, hence, of their products. This responsibility is constitutive of authorship and accounts for the interpretability of artworks. Far from undermining the concept of authorship in art, then, the appropriation artists in fact reaffirm and strengthen it.

The Crime of Forgery

Forgery is not an oft‐discussed subject. Detailed discussion of forgery by banks and other financial institutions all over the world is a taboo, ‘for fear of sowing the seeds of fraudulent schemes in other ingenious heads’. This is obvious. For once a loophole is identified and discussed, it has to be permanently plugged and sealed, which the bankers perhaps find an arduous task as it costs money and leads to the necessity of cumbersome and time‐consuming procedures being adopted. This paper will analyse the offence of forgery, the definition and the modus operandi of forgery and a sample of forgery cases in the UK and the USA.

A Chronological Review of Fingerprint Forgery

Abstract The article reviews the history of fingerprint forgery chronologically, based on about 70 papers, books and private communications. More than 30 known cases of fingerprint forgery are considered. Various techniques of fingerprint forgery are described and discussed as well as methods of fingerprint forgery detection.

The Brontës and the Case of the Beaver Forgery

The Brontës and the Case of the Beaver Forgery

Ideology and forgery: The Deventer bones

Forensic-science investigations have shown that the engravings on the bones from the Deventer collection of the National Museum of Antiquities in Leiden, The Netherlands, appear to be very suspect. Neither the pictorial engravings of Bronze-Age or Carolingian style, nor of the runes, show any signs of weathering or decomposition. Research into the Dutch archives has also indicated the ideological motivation for these apparent forgeries and that the majority of the engravings seem to have been copied directly from a Nazi magazine, ‘Hamer’, in the early 1940s. In order to resolve definitely the question of whether the engravings are real or faked, we have measured the radiocarbon age of the bones themselves. These results showed that the oldest bone dates to the Middle Ages and the others are less than a few hundred years old. This confirmed that the engravings cannot be as old as they were purported to be. This noteworthy case of forgery which had presupposed a certain ideology should be of interest to the forensic scientist.

The fifteenth‐century English heralds and their fees: A case of forgery?

The fifteenth‐century English heralds and their fees: A case of forgery?

Exegesis and Easter

The problems which biblical criticism creates for Catholics cannot be disposed of so summarily as Michael Dummet thinks. He dismisses “ most modern Catholic Biblical exegesis” on the grounds that it is “dishonest”, in the sense that exegetes arbitrarily postulate ancient literary forms among which they proceed to classify parts of the New Testament they cannot take literally, without their having to admit that such parts are thus either fiction or fraud. The dishonesty lies in claiming texts as divinely inspired while refusing to take them at face value. It seems to me, however, for a start, that Mr. Dummett goes wrong on two important matters of fact.First, as to pseudonymous writing, it is just not true that exegetes have invented the existence of such literature in order to place a document such as the Second Epistle of St. Peter within a well-known ancient literary convention, i.e. the convention of writing letters as if they were being written by some famous man already deceased. Not only was there an abundance of such pseudonymous writing in the ancient world at large but evidence for it exists in Judaism as well as in early Christianity. In spite of much research and speculation (see Kummel, page 362 for bibliography), many questions remain unanswered, particularly about the motives of such writing. The principle of pseudonymous writing was not generally questioned, though cases of forgery and fraud were certainly denounced. It should not be lightly assumed that New Testament writings are pseudonymous, but there are no grounds for asserting that pseudonymous writing was necessarily dishonest, less still for asserting that as a literary convention it never existed or was soon forgotten (think of the apocryphal Christian literature of the second century and later).

Ink Differentiation with Infrared Techniques

Abstract There are often questioned document problems in which alterations, additions, and obliterations have been made by visually similar inks. Such cases of forgery have been found in checks, passports, birth certificates, receipts, currency notes, lottery tickets, account books, etc. In the examination of such documents, an expert is often not interested in the complete composition of the inks involved, but is basically concerned with discriminating between these inks which are visually similar but chemically different in composition. He is thus interested in comparative study of the properties of various inks at large. A chemical analyst provided with a bottle of ink can determine the complete composition of an ink by several physico-chemical methods, but examination of ink on paper presents a much more complex and difficult problem [1,2]. For instance, about ninety-eight percent of the ink evaporates on writing and the residue is an extremely small quantity covering a very large surface. Ink writings, therefore, are either tested on paper or physically removed by special techniques [1,3]. This approach, apart from other basic handicaps, results in physical damage to the document in varying degrees depending upon the method used. Removal of ink from the document by solvents or physical punching of paper, followed by chromatography, electrophoresis, spectrophotometry, etc. are some of the other recent techniques which may give some specific information about composition and comparative identification [1–5]. However, these micromethods are cumbersome and require a good deal of expertise, apart from the basic disadvantage that the document is bound to be physically altered—even though to a small extent.

Extradition (Fraud and Forgery) Case.

Extradition — Conditions of — Conviction for an Offence Other than that for which Extradition is Granted.