In his Ecclesiastical History of Toledo written in the 1590s, the Spanish Jesuit historian Jerónimo Román de la Higuera offered this sound advice on writing church history:

The rambling 5,000-page manuscript that contained this advice never saw publication, partly for its literary flaws and partly for the animosity that the Jesuit hierarchy felt toward its vain and contentious author. Nor did most of Higuera's other historical, hagiographic, and antiquarian works—more than twenty in all. But the prolific and ambitious scholar would become famous for one work that boldly flouted the very same advice: a series of fictitious ancient and medieval chronicles. The cronicones, which Higuera claimed he acquired from the Benedictine abbey of Fulda in Germany, purported to record the first twelve centuries of the Christian church in the Iberian Peninsula, beginning with the apostolic missions of James and Paul. While pious legends for this period abounded, authentic sources were distressingly scarce, so Higuera drew on his knowledge of the scant existing sources to invent four new ones, which he attributed to four different ancient authors: Flavius Lucius Dexter, Marcus Maximus, Luitprand [sic], and Julián Pérez. He drew the first two authors’ names (in part) from Jerome's and Isidore's De viris illustribus, and invented the other two. The cronicones mimicked the sparse annalistic style of Eusebius and Jerome's Chronicles, but the names and dates they contained provided a rich historical foundation for numerous local saints’ and martyrs’ cults across southern Spain, making them irresistible to many Catholic readers. The scholar who had warned against “legend” and “fabrication” succeeded remarkably in promoting his own fabrications as documented truths. The cronicones began to circulate widely in manuscript in the 1590s, and were eventually printed in eight posthumous editions between 1619 and 1651. Since Jacques-Paul Migne included them in the Patrologia Latina in the mid-nineteenth century, they continue to trip up unwary scholars even today.

The story of Higuera's forged chronicles has long figured in Spanish scholarship as a cautionary tale of the dangers of pious credulity. A long line of critical Spanish scholars denounced Higuera's falsifications, beginning with his own contemporaries Juan Bautista Pérez and Juan de Mariana, continuing with Nicolás Antonio's Censura de historias fabulosas (written in 1670 and published posthumously in 1742), and culminating with Godoy Alcántara's masterful Historia crítica de los falsos crónicones (1868). In this historiographical tradition, the main protagonists have been Higuera's perspicacious humanist critics, beginning with Pérez and Mariana, who had the critical acumen to condemn the texts as (in Mariana's words) “fake and worthless” (205). Olds admires these critics, too, but in this brilliant reappraisal she turns her most intense gaze in the other direction, toward the much-maligned Higuera, his scholarly allies, and his large network of defenders. She urges us to understand Higuera not just as a shameless forger, but also as a talented historian and a legitimate, albeit eccentric, representative of early modern Spanish historiography.

Olds faults earlier interpreters for casting Higuera's story in stark language of “truth against falsehood” (61) and explaining the forgeries as the product of the forger's own moral or psychological failings. One may ask whether this characterization does full justice to all of Higuera's earlier interpreters, and whether Olds is quite right to insist on “separat[ing] the study of forgery from value judgments” altogether (10). But she makes a persuasive case that Higuera's similarities to other scholars are at least as interesting as his differences. She reconstructs Higuera's career as a talented and respected (if disliked) local historian in Toledo, emphasizing his active membership in an early modern “republic of letters” and his affinities with Catholic humanists outside of Spain, like Cesare Baronio, who put ecclesiastical history on a new footing with their unprecedentedly thorough antiquarian research. The fellow antiquarians with whom Higuera corresponded, mostly other ecclesiastics, offered Higuera invaluable material, and his learned exchanges with these men sharpened his critical sense. His varied corpus of historical writings contained a great deal of impressive and credible research, and he recognized forgeries when he saw them in others’ work. Olds even argues that the cronicones themselves should be taken seriously as state-of-the-art church history, pointing out that more than half of their content was not invented by Higuera or his friends, but taken from earlier, medieval sources. They were thus by no means examples of “clear-cut forgery” (114), but “complex amalgams of the true and the false” (100).

For all her recognition of the humanist “revolution in historical method” (18), Olds also emphasizes that Higuera and his defenders exhibited profound continuities with medieval historical thought. Where Higuera's chronicles drew on authentic sources, they employed the venerable medieval techniques of compliatio, ordinatio, and concordia. When Higuera invented material outright, he likewise followed medieval precedent. Drawing on Giles Constable and Alfred Hiatt's work on medieval forgery, and on Anthony Grafton's comparative studies of ancient, medieval, and early modern forgers, Olds makes clear that Higuera stood in a long tradition of pious forgers who crafted plausible facsimiles of supposedly lost originals to support traditions that they firmly believed to be true, at least in their broad outlines. For Higuera, the underlying truths to be affirmed were ones that connected local piety with the principles of Tridentine Catholicism. The result was a picture of an early Spanish church planted by Biblical apostles and martyr-saints, led by a strong episcopal hierarchy, loyal to Rome, but venerating its own saints with prayer and pilgrimage across a broad Spanish landscape.

When Olds turns to the long line of scholars and churchmen who defended Higuera's chronicles well into the seventeenth century, she finds a similar medieval hermeneutic at work. These defenders were not wholly fooled by the cronicones, but regarded them as “flawed apocrypha,” neither wholly authentic nor outright forgeries (287). For these readers, the texts’ errors, inconsistencies, and inevitable mistakes were best explained as the result of a complex manuscript transmission. In the absence of comparable sources, the cronicones were the best available, albeit deeply flawed, vestiges of early Christian traditions too valuable to be discarded. Forging the Past concludes in the eighteenth century, when Enlightened criticism demolished such arguments, and these Enlightened critics clearly have Olds's greatest admiration. But the book's most memorable contribution overall is this sympathetic reconsideration of the motives and the intellectual milieu of the much-maligned forger and his early modern defenders.

Forging the Past is a deeply researched, multi-layered, and brilliant work that illuminates far more aspects of early modern devotion and scholarship than can be summarized here, including church politics, Jesuits, and conversos in sixteenth-century Toledo; relations between the Spanish church and the papacy; and the interplay of sacred historiography with relics discoveries, hagiography, and local devotion. Erudite and dense but engagingly written, it is sure to become a classic in early modern Spanish history, and will be of great value to those interested in the history of scholarship, early modern Christianity, or church history.