Date/Time
Date(s) - 28 Mar 2016
5:15 PM - 5:15 PM
Location
Class of 1978 Pavilion, Special Collections Center
Category(ies) No Categories
March 28: Nick Wilding, Georgia State University, “Forging the Moon; Or, How to Spot a Fake Galileo”
About his presentation, Nick writes:
“The integrity of the historical record is a prime concern for any historian. It follows that the art of detecting forgeries is crucial to our craft. Early modern print materials have generally been held above suspicion as a technologically impossible, or at least unprofitable, subject for forgery. But the emergence in 2005 of a spectacular copy of Galileo’s cosmos-changing Sidereus Nuncius, furnished with an autograph inscription and hand drawn lunar illustrations, forced a reconsideration of this assumption. By reconstructing the recent history of the analysis of this single and singular object, I show how, when viewed from different perspectives, within shifting contexts, and alongside a choice of control copies, a seemingly rigorous and secure authentication can gradually lose its certainty and eventually even become proof of forgery.”
Nick Wilding is Associate Professor of History at Georgia State University and currently a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He received his BA in English from Oxford University, his MA in Renaissance Studies at Warwick, and his PhD from the European University Institute, Florence, Italy. He has held postdoctoral positions at Stanford University, Cambridge University, Columbia University, and the American Academy in Rome. Specializing in early modern history of science and communication, he has worked on two projects bringing archival resources to the internet: the Athanasius Kircher Correspondence Project and the Medici Archive Project. His first book, Galileo’s Idol: Gianfrancesco Sagredo and the Politics of Knowledge, was published in September 2014 by the University of Chicago Press and won the 2016 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Italian Studies from the MLA; his second, Faussaire de Lune. Autopsie d’une Imposture: Galilée et ses contrefacteurs, came out in December 2015 from the Bibliothèque National de France. He is currently working on a history of print forgery.
Unless otherwise noted, all meetings of the Workshop in the History of Material Texts convene at 5:15 pm in the Class of 1978 Pavilion in the Kislak Center on the 6th Floor of Penn’s Van Pelt-Dietrich Library.