In Spain the last decade of the sixteenth century was particularly rich in the production of forgeries. Besides Miguel de Luna's Verdadera historia del rey Don Rodrigo, published between 1592 and 1600, one of the best known cases is that of the ‘lead books’ of Granada. These were texts, accompanied by objects, intended to prove that the first Christians in Spain were Arabic-speakers martyred in the great city of Andalusia. At about the same time, in 1594, Jerónimo Román de la Higuera, a Jesuit in Toledo, maintained that he had received from Worms in Germany a copy of a chronicle held by the Benedictines in Fulda. It was started by Flavius Lucius Dexter, a contemporary of Jerome, and continued by Marcus Maximus, Luitprand, and a more recent Spaniard, Julián Pérez. If there is evidence for the historical existence of Dexter and some of the other chroniclers, Julián Pérez was an invention of Higuera's. According to the chronicles (or cronicones, as the texts were known in Spain), a primitive Christianity, which tallied perfectly with the Catholicism sanctioned at the Council of Trent, had survived during the Arab occupation of the Iberian peninsula largely thanks to the Mozarabs of Toledo, from whom Higuera proudly claimed descent. Spain, the cronicones implied, was in fact the cradle of Christianity in the West.

Higuera, his personality, his world, his technique as a historian and his immense influence, are the subject of Katrina Olds's Forging the past. But Katrina Olds also tackles various broader questions connected with the history of forgery. What motives, for example, might a forger have? We are now accustomed to associate forgery with financial profit, but this can be ruled out where the Spanish products are concerned. The propaganda provided by the forgeries, rather, was an answer to certain social and historical problems connected with the legacy of Arab rule and the multicultural reality of medieval Spain where Muslims and Jews (far more than Christians) each made their contribution to Iberian culture. The new Christian Spain of the Reconquista was out to prove that centuries of Muslim rule had left the peninsula untarnished. For this purpose saints and martyrs proving the survival of Christianity were essential, particularly at a time when forces in Rome, represented by historians such as Baronius, were endeavouring to restrict the number of saints who had found their way into the history of the Church and questioned the credentials of many saints thought to have been Spanish.

Another question raised by Katrina Olds concerns contemporary criteria regarding historical truth. The scepticism with which many scholars received the forgeries – both those of Higuera and the ‘lead books’ – proves not only that they exacted a certain standard of veracity, but that they were perfectly capable of recognising spurious documents. Yet at the same time the widespread support for the forgeries reveals a very different attitude. Truth or authenticity in themselves were no doubt welcome, but it was also felt that, in the absence of reliable evidence about a distant period, anything was better than nothing. Then there was the matter of edification – a quality which could indeed substitute for truth. If a text served to increase the devotion of the faithful, as well as to be ‘agreeable to the ears’, it was fully acceptable. What was better designed to increase devotion than the cronicones with their account of so many heroic martyrs who had suffered for their faith?

And what, finally, actually constitutes a forgery? A number of the apocryphal books of the Bible, as well as the more or less spurious ‘ancient’ texts concocted in the first centuries of the Christian era, contained excerpts from canonical texts or the vestiges of an oral tradition which could not always be dismissed as fake. In the case of Higuera's cronicones historians are still trying to disentangle the invented from the genuine, and in doing so, as Katrina Olds shows convincingly, they cannot help being struck by Higuera's extraordinary learning and knowledge of history. He was, after all, the author of a massive history of Toledo largely based on sources which were perfectly reputable. That he should never have published it was due not to its defects or to the detection of any mendacity, but to decisions taken by the Jesuit authorities, to their various changes of policy, and to the extraordinary unpopularity which Higuera, who had not hesitated to denounce his colleagues to the Inquisition, had managed to acquire within the Society.

Higuera's cronicones were published posthumously. He died in 1611 and the first published edition of his forgeries appeared in 1619. It included the chronicles attributed to Dexter and Maximus, but not the part by Julián Pérez, which was first published in 1628. Other editions of other parts of the work came out between 1635 and 1654. The first edition was far from satisfactory and later editors vied with each other to improve and to substantiate the veracity of the texts. They turned out to be immensely influential throughout Spain. For Toledo, and indeed Granada, were by no means alone in seeking local saints whose heroism could testify to the antiquity of their Christianity. Numerous Spanish towns came up with their own martyrs who were duly welcomed by the authorities. This process, however, ran parallel to the increasing efforts by Spanish scholars to prove the spuriousness of Higuera's texts. Yet the research of sceptics such as Gregorio Mayans i Siscar and Benito Jerónimo Feijoo in the eighteenth century only really bore fruit in the late nineteenth century when, in 1870, the journalist José Godoy Alcántara at last persuaded the Real Academia de Historia in Madrid to accept their conclusions.

Forging the past is a fascinating book. Few scholars will be able to compete with Katrina Olds for sheer knowledge of the world of local Spanish historians from the late sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Not only has she delved into every cranny of Higuera's life and career, but she has made a lasting contribution to the analysis of forgeries in early modern Europe.