Introducing an Age of Impostors

Abstract

Early modern Europe was teeming with impostors. Men and women from all walks of life were inventing, fabricating and disguising themselves, lying about who they were or pretending to be someone they were not. As a result, authorities, both religious and secular, were frantically creating new means for ascertaining each person’s identity. The story told in this book is one chapter in the long history of a contest between the forgers of identities and the creators of new and more efficient methods of identification, methods which in their turn bred new imaginative ways for evading the removal of masks. It was a race which began with the dawn of civilization — for example Odysseus disguising himself as a beggar to enter the city of Troy, or the biblical Jacob stealing his father’s blessing by impersonating Esau (Genesis 27) and the Gileadites identifying the Ephraimites by their inability to pronounce Shibboleth (Judges 12:5–6) — and has never ended. Today, in the second decade of the twenty- first century, despite the most sophisticated means of identification based on the latest advancements in science and technology, the battle against impersonation and the invention of identity is still far from won.