Katrina Olds

“Forging the Past is truly excellent. For a case study, it’s quite a case, full of twists and turns, shifting scenery, the mix of low chicanery and spiritual highmindedness, and a fair amount of what any historian would regard as sheer intellectual perversity.”—James Amelang, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid *****


“Olds achieves the impossible: From the thicket of alleged Spanish medieval credulity, she pulls out the raucous presence of modern epistemological criticism. Only scholars like Olds, with the erudition and exquisite sensibility to recover lost worlds, can unravel today the tangle of extraordinary philological expertise, antiquarian networks, and communities of active critical readers that went into the invention and consumption of the new Catholic apocryphal traditions.”— Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, University of Texas at Austin ****


“Forging the Past offers a comprehensive and wholly original account of one of the most important but often forgotten chapters in Spain’s sacred history. Meticulously researched and a pleasure to read, this gem of a study represents scholarship at its very best.”—Richard Kagan, Johns Hopkins University ****


“In her elegant and thoughtful book, Olds insightfully unveils the overlapping of myth and history in Higuera's 'false chronicles' and how the use of reliable historical sources to construct a forged past shaped the Spanish and European early modern historical landscape. A terrific and wonderful book!"—Teofilo F. Ruiz, University of California, Los Angeles ****


"In this elegant and erudite book, Katrina Olds explains why the Jesuit Jerónimo Roman de la Higuera devised a complex imaginary history for the early Spanish church. Her work brilliantly illuminates both Counter-Reformation Catholicism and early modern historiography."—Anthony Grafton, Princeton University ****


Spain’s infamous “false chronicles” were alleged to have been unearthed in 1595 in a monastic library deep in the heart of the German-speaking territories of the Holy Roman Empire by the Jesuit priest Jerónimo Román de la Higuera. Though rife with anachronisms and chronological inaccuracies, these four volumes of invented “truths” about Spanish sacred history radically transformed the religious landscape in Counter-Reformation Spain and were not definitively exposed as forgeries until centuries later, after nearly two hundred years of scholarly debate.



In this fascinating study, Katrina B. Olds explores the history, the author, and the legacy of one of the world’s most compelling and consequential frauds. The book examines how a relatively obscure Jesuit priest so successfully fabricated a set of supposedly historical documents that they were accepted as authentic for generation after generation. In fact, the chronicles exerted such a powerful influence that they continued to shape scholarly discourse, religious practice, and local heritage throughout Spain well into the twentieth century, despite having been debunked as forgeries in the eighteenth. Olds’s fascinating analysis brings together intellectual, cultural, religious, and political history while reinvigorating an ongoing debate on the uses and abuses of history and the nature of historical and religious truth.

After the Reformation, Spanish scholars sought evidence of the antiquity of Catholicism in Iberian territories.  Yet if proof of early Christian history was sparse in Spain, it was entirely lacking in the Americas.  This changed as clerical historians and indigenous communities uncovered relics and memories of a New World apostolate.  One such discovery was documented c.1600 by Jesuit missionaries in the Andean indigenous community of Carabuco, where an apostle’s cross was unearthed near Lake Titicaca.  This chapter suggests that the Cross of Carabuco, like other objects and narratives of early Christianity, was both shaped and inspired by local memory cultures as well as by the concerns of clerical historians.  It contends that since Spanish-American chroniclers of sacred history, like their counterparts in Spain, were hard-pressed to find textual or material evidence of primeval Catholicism in their localities, they turned to a third class of evidence which included oral traditions, natural wonders, miracles, and other prodigious phenomena.  As relics about early Christianity emerged from the ground, they buttressed local memories of religious continuity, many of which have since survived five successive centuries of political, religious, and epidemiological upheaval on both sides of the Atlantic.

In the seventeenth century, Spanish antiquarians collected inscriptions, coins, and other evidence of their community’s illustrious Christian origins, conflictive medieval past, and glorious present.  Efforts to compile a suitable local history were particularly determined and prolific in the Andalusian diocese of Jaén, where two local enthusiasts of the past – Francisco de Rus Puerta and Martín Ximena Jurado – generated a voluminous body of manuscripts and printed books under the sponsorship of Jaén’s bishop.  Like their counterparts elsewhere in Europe, Jaén’s antiquaries documented the past in both text and image, as the authors sketched coins, ruins in situ, and ongoing excavations for antiquities and saints’ relics.   

In these efforts, Greco-Roman antiquity played the handmaiden to the early Christian era, for it was of intense concern for Andalusian Catholics to prove that the Islamic invasion had not disrupted the region’s deep and essential Christian identity.  In this way, ‘antiquity’ was a rather motley-colored creature, encompassing not only the remains of Roman Hispania, but also including pre-Roman antiquities from Spain’s early Greek, Phoenician, and Celtiberian peoples, as well as Visigothic and some Islamic artifacts.  This promiscuous sense of antiquity is evident in the historical texts and images – including sketches, woodcuts, and other visual representations of coins, inscriptions, and ruins – compiled and produced by these local antiquarians.  This distinctive vision of the past is only aberrant when viewed from the perspective of Renaissance Italy; as modern scholarship on the shape of local antiquarianisms continues to evolve, it has become evident that, both in their methods, preoccupations, and distinctly broad sense of ‘antiquity,’ the Jaén scholars were far from unique in the intellectual and social environment of early modern Europe.

The forged histories known as the “false chronicles” touched upon many controversial matters in early-modern Spain. Less familiar to scholars is that the forger, Jerónimo Román de la Higuera, was also reacting to the Roman reforms spearheaded by Cardinal Cesare Baronio. Higuera’s 1589 letter to Baronio reveals his principal preoccupations, as well as the maneuvers that he would later employ in the false chronicles. These included direct interventions by Higuera on behalf of communities such as Sigüenza, which were attempting to protect local historical and hagiographic traditions that they believed were jeopardized by Baronio’s revisions of the Church’s liturgical texts.

Dürer & the New Age of Print Events:

Tuesday, Jan. 27: An insider’s introduction and roundtable will take place from 1:30-3 p.m. in USF’s McLaren Conference Center 250, followed by an opening reception from 3-4 p.m. in Thacher Gallery and the Donohue Rare Book Room. The roundtable will feature Susan B. Dackerman (Carl A. Weyerhaeuser Curator of Prints, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University), Elizabeth A. Honig (Professor of History of Art, University of California, Berkeley), Katrina B. Olds (Associate Professor of History, University of San Francisco), two Museum Studies student curators, Sabrina Oliveras and Melissa Zabel, and will be moderated by Kate Lusheck (Assistant Professor, Art History & Museum Studies, University of San Francisco).