new article on Jean Hardouin

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StephenGoranson
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new article on Jean Hardouin

Post by StephenGoranson »

Jean Hardouin (1646-1729), according to Britannica online "...Though a man of great learning, Hardouin developed strange theories and dismissed works that contradicted his opinions: he came to believe that most of the writings of Greek and Latin antiquity were medieval forgeries executed by a conspiracy of monks."

Further discussed in an article posted Dec. 3:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-des ... l-paranoia
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Leucius Charinus
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Re: new article on Jean Hardouin

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StephenGoranson wrote: Sun Dec 05, 2021 6:51 am Jean Hardouin (1646-1729), according to Britannica online "...Though a man of great learning, Hardouin developed strange theories and dismissed works that contradicted his opinions: he came to believe that most of the writings of Greek and Latin antiquity were medieval forgeries executed by a conspiracy of monks."

Further discussed in an article posted Dec. 3:
https://www.chronicle.com/article/a-des ... l-paranoia


The author of this article holds professorships in (Renaissance) history and the classics. He prefaces his introduction to Hardouin by saying this:
  • "More information is available more quickly than ever before. In many ways, that’s good. But it has also led to paranoia, suspicion, and conspiracy theorizing, from such sources as QAnon, Mark Crispin Miller, and the anti-vaccination community. Those who subscribe to these theories are “doing their own research,” and they are doing it in the context of proliferating information with few gatekeepers. Something like this has happened before, during an earlier moment when information, skepticism, and conspiracy-thinking collided. I’m thinking of the French Jesuit Jean Hardouin, now largely forgotten."
He introduces Hardouin as an expert philologist:
  • "Hardouin’s edition of Pliny came out in 1685 in five volumes, and it was a success. That he was charged with the edition shows that he was respected as a philologist, an expert by the lights of his day."
But then things changed:
  • "By the early 1690s, something changed. For it was then, as Hardouin later wrote, that he “began to scent fraud in Augustine.” Augustine’s two masterpieces, the Confessions and The City of God, profoundly shaped medieval Christianity. The first offered a narrative of personal conversion and surrender to Christ, the second a framework for how to view history — not as a meaningless series of rises and falls of empires but rather as a progression, one in which (someday, at the end of time) the City of God would triumph over the City of Man. Hardouin had come to believe that the writings of the most important Church Father were fake."
And then things turned into a conspiracy theory:
  • "Things got worse. Hardouin came to see what he believed to be Augustine’s forgeries as only one tile in a vast mosaic of forgery. Almost every ancient and authoritative text, he concluded, was forged."
From elsewhere we hear that this group of forgers he never defined or discussed, but always referred to them generically as 'the impious crew', or the 'maudite cabale'.


What new information could have influenced this extreme scepticism in Hardouin?

I have sometimes suspected that Hardouin became aware of the ramifications of the earlier work of David_Blondel. In 1628 the Protestant Blondel published his decisive study, "Pseudo-Isidorus et Turrianus vapulantes". Since then the apocryphal nature of the decretals of Isidore has been an established historical fact. His 1628 book against Francisco Torres conclusively demonstrated that the Pseudo-Isidorian Decretals were a very learned forgery. This work was praised by Voltaire, writing (well after Hardouin) in his Dictionnaire Philosophique. Blondel tracked down sources actually used by the Pseudo-Isidore. Later scholarship has sustained his conclusions.

What was the Pseudo-Isidore Latin forgery mill?

From https://pseudo-isidore.com/ (new)
and http://pseudoisidore.blogspot.com.au/ (old)
Eric Knibbs, Assistant Professor of History
An interesting story ....
  • "Thus it happens [in the ninth century] that popes of the first three centuries are made to quote documents that did not appear until the fourth or fifth century; and later popes up to Gregory I (590-604) are found employing documents dating from the sixth, seventh, and eighth centuries, and the early part of the ninth. Then again there are endless anachronisms. The Middle Ages were deceived by this huge forgery, but during the Renaissance men of learning and the canonists generally began to recognize the fraud."

Eric Knibbs also provides the recent scholarship from the 20th century,
the Pseudo-Isidore scholars Paul Hinschius, Emil Seckel, Horst Fuhrmann.

And writes:
  • "About ten years ago, Klaus Zechiel-Eckes discovered that our forgers likely did their work at the monastery of Corbie. He found two Corbie manuscripts -- St. Petersburg, National Library of Russia, Ms. F. v. I. 11, and Paris, BNF, Ms. lat. 11611 -- with curious marks and letters in the margins. Both manuscripts contain texts that Pseudo-Isidore used as sources -- The Petersburg codex has the Historia Tripartita of Cassiodorus; the Paris book
    has the acts of the Council of Chalcedon. In both cases, the marginal notes mark off passages that later on appear as part of that mosiac of sources constituting Pseudo-Isidore's forged decretals, and also the forged capitulary collection of Benedictus Levita.

    So it looks like a secretarial team was going through manuscripts of key works in the Corbie
    library (one of the best appointed in all of Carolingian Europe), highlighting relevant passages. Later on, somebody else took all of these highlighted excerpts and stitched them together, yielding the forgeries as we have them today. So far we only know of several manuscripts with the source marks. If this was how Pseudo-Isidore did all of his research, though, poking about should yield some more."

We may never know what pushed Hardouin over the edge.
Too bad they didn't have radiocarbon dating at that time.

But it may well be that Hardouin read and studied Blondel, or reviews of Blondel's work, and became ultra sceptical of the integrity of the literary material preserved within the archives of the Latin church industry for the preceding centuries.










LINKS:


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Celenza
https://pseudo-isidore.com
https://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05773a.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudo-Isidore
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Blondel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Hardouin
StephenGoranson
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Re: new article on Jean Hardouin

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Hardouin had heard of Blondel, as his published, and now online, works attest, though not necessarily as you might speculate.
Secret Alias
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Re: new article on Jean Hardouin

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Lol. What gave you the idea that this guy would be popular at the forum. Red meat and blood for the piranhas!
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billd89
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Re: on Kooks, Generally

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  • "More information is available more quickly than ever before. In many ways, that’s good. But it has also led to paranoia, suspicion, and conspiracy theorizing, from such sources as QAnon, Mark Crispin Miller, and the anti-vaccination community. Those who subscribe to these theories are “doing their own research,” and they are doing it in the context of proliferating information with few gatekeepers. Something like this has happened before, during an earlier moment when information, skepticism, and conspiracy-thinking collided. I’m thinking of the French Jesuit Jean Hardouin, now largely forgotten."

Or the Marcionites, here.

I responded on another thread to a passage from Russell Gmirkin's essay on this topic generally:
billd89 wrote: Fri Nov 26, 2021 12:08 pm
Giuseppe wrote: Fri Nov 26, 2021 3:39 am Apparently in order to support a historicist view, Russell writes:

Large groups of people believe and promote the most unbelievable ideas. As a relevant example, America is currently in the grips of an autocratic / neo-fascist movement seeking to undermine American democratic institutions that is fueled in part by a set of viral conspiracy theories known as QAnon. These theories are just plain nuts, but almost one in five Americans (15-20% according to various polls) believe in them, including 56% of Republicans. On Nov. 2, hundreds of QAnon believers gathered at Dealy Plaza, where JFK was shot, to await the predicted appearance of JFK Jr, who died in a 1999 plane crash, but who they believe is still alive. Faced with his non-appearance, some put out the theory that Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones was actually JFK Jr, because it would really be hard to distinguish the two of them in a police lineup, and JFK Jr had such mad guitar skills.

The point being, that reality and common sense has little to do with what people believe. Although QAnon originated in American fringe theories, one can point to substantial evidence that Russian internet trolls picked up and amplified the QAnon theories and helped make them uber-popular (the same was they amplified anti-Vaxxer theories and other potentially divisive topics in 2016 in order to polarize America on multiple fronts). Outside interference aside, America is fertile ground for such theories, and we have members of Congress elected to office for supporting QAnon lunacy. Ultimately, this might be a significant factor in the failure of American democracy that is currently threatening us here in the states. My point being that unbelievable theories of stunning irrationality spring up and proliferate and fuel mass movements in human societies of every era, down to the present.

There is a plausible case that the 4Chan troll who launched this Bad Joke on Amerikkka was inspired by or copying the Italian (anarchist) culture-jamming activists of the Luther Blissett Project.

I am also not the first person to note the similarities w/ Illuminatus! and Church of the SubGenius. The Dallas founders cite the JFK Conspiracy theories as a major inspiration for their project. But then, this place sometimes reminds me of a unironical Bob Dobbs love-fest too.

Not to threadjack, so I started a Topic on a different branch.
I'm fairly convinced the initial QAnon is a douchenozzle from Illuminatus!/Church of the SubGenius. It's a spoof run wild, the virus that escaped the Laboratory...

As we race (again) towards the brink of war with Russia, let us pause and remember our sacred purpose: preserving the purity of our precious bodily fluids! 1946: an Iron Curtain descends over Europe... and recall that bane of the Birchers, FLUORIDATION.


"Goodbye, Cruel World!"

Last edited by billd89 on Tue Dec 07, 2021 4:46 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Leucius Charinus
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Re: new article on Jean Hardouin

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StephenGoranson wrote: Tue Dec 07, 2021 5:05 am Hardouin had heard of Blondel, as his published, and now online, works attest, though not necessarily as you might speculate.
Renaissance history is something I have not studied.
For this I rely on historians such as Momigliano.

Jean Hardouin: The Antiquary as Pariah
Author(s): Anthony Grafton
Source: Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes , 1999, Vol. 62 (1999), pp. 241-
267
Published by: The Warburg Institute
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/751388
StephenGoranson
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Re: new article on Jean Hardouin

Post by StephenGoranson »

Anthony Grafton is a fine historian. He has a relevant book:
Forgers and Critics, Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship—New edition (Princeton UP, 2019; 1st ed., 2007).

The “Isidore” fakes are centuries earlier than the ones Hardouin, late in life, imagined.

Trivia: the term “truth decay” came up in NY Times last November:
In NY Times, Ben Smith, "New Words to Label the Truth," wrote:
"What had been a niche preoccupation has now been adopted by people who have spent somewhat less time on 4chan than Ms. Donovan. The broadcaster Katie Couric recently led the Aspen Institute's Commission on Information Disorder. I moderated a panel at Bloomberg's New Economy Forum with a different, somewhat dental, label for the same set of issues, "truth decay." (The RAND Corporation seems to have coined that one, though T Bone Burnett did release an album by that name in 1980.)"

But in 1974:
Fluoridation and truth decay,
Gladys Caldwell; Philip E Zanfagna
1974
English Book 301 pages illustrations 22 cm
[Reseda, Calif.] Top-Ecol Press
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