Profs & Pints Northern Virginia: Forgeries Throughout History

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Forgeries Throughout History,” on famous fakes and their real impact, with Vanessa R. Corcoran, Catholic Church and medieval historian and director of Catholic Studies at Georgetown University. Today people often discuss fraud and forgery as if they are uniquely modern problems—the products of the internet, artificial intelligence, and the rise of deepfakes. But the impulse to deceive by fabricating evidence, identities, or images is far older than any digital technology. Moreover, even those who did not get away with it for long sometimes altered the course of history with their trickery. Learn in depth about such deceptions during an evening of mythmaking and myth-busting with Dr. Vanessa R. Corcoran, previously has given excellent Profs and Pints on Catholic history and culture and the 2025 papal conclave. She’ll walk you through a series of forgeries tied to the Crusades, the Catholic Church, and the Byzantine Empire, especially focusing on fakery that confounded the medieval world. You’ll learn about cases involving forged documents, imitated signatures, counterfeited money, bogus works of art, and imposters in disguise. We’ll look at how Roman artists in antiquity created sculptures that they attempted to pass off as Greek works to increase marketability. (Even Michelangelo was guilty of trying to disguise one of his sculptures as a work from the classical era.) Later on, Dutch painter Han Van Meegeren created numerous forgeries of Vermeer’s paintings, ultimately getting convicted of fraud and forgery. Among acts of deception that changed the course of history was a medieval forgery titled “The Donation of Constantine,” which as of the late 700s was used to buttress claims that the fourth-century Byzantine Emperor Constantine I had transferred authority over Rome to the Pope. It was viewed as authentic until fifteenth-century Renaissance humanist Lorenzo Valla debunked it as created centuries after Constantine died. A popular legend in the Catholic Church held that a woman later known as “Pope Joan” disguised herself as a man and ruled as “popess” in the ninth century. That narrative, largely debunked by modern historians, was treated by medieval chronicles as credible and used to buttress arguments that women should be ordained as priests. Among other cases we’ll examine include the Shroud of Turin, purported to be the burial shroud of Jesus of Nazareth, which was denounced as forgery as early as 1389 but remains venerated as a relic by some believers. Dr. Corcoran’s talk will offer an important lens for understanding the challenges and stakes of today’s debates over AI-generated fakery. You’ll walk away with an appreciation of how every generation has had to learn, often painfully, how to distinguish what merely looks authentic from what actually is. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.) Image: Customers at a 1984 art and antiques fair examine a Han van Meegeren fake of a Vermeer. (Photo by Rob C. Croes, National Archives of the Netherlands.)

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Tickets: https://go.evvnt.com/3790238-0

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