View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAEHJjQki0g
Tamanksy makes a very bold claim in this video, and has some evidence to back it up. If what he suggests is true, and it does make sense, it completely changes how we should analyze old books.
He thinks that moveable type printing wasn't invented until the late 17th century. Before that, books were printed using a woodcut technique in which entire pages were carved out of wood by hand and letters were impressed using punches. Obviously the movable type process is orders of magnitude more efficient.
He believes that the history forgers used the invention of the movable type printing around 1700 to completely rewrite everything. As in, they gathered up all the old woodcut prints, which presumably were not so numerous (?), recopied them, changed whatever needed to be changed, printed it with movable type and fake dates, and burned the originals. It was also at this point that the fake Gutenberg Bible story was created in order to backdate the invention of the printing press. Tamansky points out the absurdity that the very first printed book should be such a masterpiece of technical perfection. Not only that, it contains only the books that were canonized centuries later.
What this means is that any books with a publication date earlier than about 1700 and printed with movable type must be backdated forgeries.
This would go a long way towards explaining how we get so much confusion between the 15th, 16th, and 17th centuries.
It also suggests that 1700 is a cutoff date of sorts in the sense that once you have thousands of printed editions of a book floating around in private hands, you cannot safely rewrite history, since a few copies will inevitably escape the recall order. Even if only one makes it through it can be dangerous. This suggested to me that at least SOME of the books we have that were printed in the 16th and 17th century were authentic.
If Tamansky is right, none of them are authentic, and we really can't trust anything printed using movable type and dated earlier than about 1700. It means that anything supposedly published before that date has to be considered propaganda, because if it weren't there would be no reason to artificially backdate it.
We're all familiar with the images of monks slaving away for lifetimes recopying manuscripts. Well, maybe the monks were also slaving away printing and backdating books. In another post I shared a huge anomaly I found on Google Books, namely a book printed in 1509 that refers to Joseph Scaliger, who wasn't born yet. Well, if both Scaliger and the book in question were artificially backdated around 1700, this becomes a bit less of a mystery.
Presumably if this began in 1700, they couldn't change the 17th century too much, because everyone alive remembered it and would presumably notice if they changed it too much. For safety's sake they might have preferred to send the really fake stuff back to the 16th century and before.
I went to Google Books and thought I might check for more anomalies. The philosopher Descartes was born in 1596. I set the publication dates from 1500 to 1600 and searched for Descartes. Sure enough, here you go:
Copie d'vne lettre envoyee d'Angleterre a dom Bernardin de Mendoze ambassadeur en France pour le roy d'Espagne. Par laquelle est declaré l'estat du royaume d'Angleterre, contre l'attente de dom Bernardin & de tous ses partizans ... Encore que ceste lettre fust envoyée ... la copie d'icelle, tant en anglois qu'en françois, a esté trouuée en la chambre de Richard Leigh seminaire, ..
This book was published in 1588 and contains multiple references to Descartes. Oops!
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I found the following title page from a book by Francois Duran Jos with a publication date of MCCDLXII. The D and the CC are in the wrong places. What does it mean?
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I did a Google Ngram search for "Rabelais" (1483-1553) in French, and guess what, no mention of him at all in the 16th century. When were the works attributed to him really written, and why were they sent back to the 16th century? I found a title page from a supposed 1532 first edition, but upon closer inspection it was a 19th century facsimile.
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