A Fake or Genuine Artefact? The Parian Chronicle and Perceptions of Authenticity in Eighteenth-Century Britain

A remarkable controversy raged in the late 1780s concerning the authenticity of the Parian Chronicle, a supposedly genuine carved fragment recording ancient Greek history that was included in the 1667 Arundel bequest to the University of Oxford. Drawing in figures in British antiquarianism, including Richard Gough who, as Director of the Society of Antiquaries of London, intervened in the debate with a pamphlet that came out in support of the artefact’s authenticity, this was an important moment in eighteenth-century antiquarian study. Hot on the heels of the now much more well-known Ossian controversy of the 1760s, the Chatterton–Rowley–Walpole debacle from 1770, Chatterton’s subsequent death and the publication of his forgeries from 1777, the literature variously refuting and supporting the Parian Chronicle’s authenticity strikes at the heart of antiquarianism, in particular opening up to dispute assumptions made about or accepted interpretations concerning the authenticity of the fragments upon which subsequent antiquarian work and interpretation was based. This debate took the form of a very public attack upon, and defence of, the Parian Chronicle’s status as a genuine third-century bc antiquarian fragment, and the controversy within antiquarian circles that it occasioned is reconstructed here

Art · Art history · Bequest · Interpretation (philosophy · Literature · Political science · Classical Antiquity Studies · Classics · Historical and Literary Studies · Historical Art and Culture Studies · History · Law · Philosophy

• The Historia Regum Britanniae of Geoffrey of Monmouth

  Valerie I J Flint•Speculum•1979

  Add to list

• The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence

  Dora Mae Clark, W S Lewis et al.•The American Historical Review•1942

  Add to list

• The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence

  Dora Mae Clark, W S Lewis et al.•The American Historical Review•1955

  Add to list

• The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence

  D M Clark, W S Lewis et al.•The American Historical Review•1938

  Add to list

• A Catalogue of Horace Walpole's Library

  Robert R Allen, Allen T Hazen et al.•Eighteenth-Century Studies•1972

  Add to list

• The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence

  Robert K Root, W S Lewis et al.•Modern Language Notes•1945

  Add to list

• Heraldry and the Architectural Imagination

  Open Access•Peter Lindfield•The Antiquaries Journal•2016

  Add to list