Nick Wilding is in the Department of History at Georgia State University. Professor Wilding specializes in Early Modern history of science and communication and has published articles on John Wilkins, Athanasius Kircher, Robert Hooke and Galileo Galilei.
The difficulties involved in detecting twenty-first century forgeries of early modern books show that we are close to producing perfect forgeries. This talk will describe the history of faking print artifacts and the economic and cultural systems that make such forgeries possible. When did print first acquire the capacity adequately to represent reality? Under what conditions does it matter whether a printed object is materially genuine? What would happen were we to abandon our efforts to distinguish between the fake and the real book?
The Philipp Fehl Memorial Lecture is free and open to the public. For more information, contact the Center for Advanced Study at 333-6729 or cas.illinois.edu
Thanks to the Center for Advanced Study listserv for this information item.