Lecture looks at fake news in medieval times
Fake news may be a newly popularized phrase that conjures up sinister mass media machinations or the image of trolling politicians, but the concepts the term raises have been around for centuries.
Dr. Craig Nakashian, assistant professor of history at Texas A&M UniversityTexarkana, explores this with an upcoming lecture titled “Fake News in the Medieval World” at 2:30 p.m. on Saturday, Aug. 18, at the Ace of Clubs House carriage house downtown.
Nakashian will discuss ways the truth became blurred during the medieval era. He’s been struck with how the phrase “fake news” is everywhere now, bringing out interesting discussions about the nature of what is true and what’s real.
“What can we trust and what can’t we?” he said. And as a medievalist, he believes there’s nothing new under the sun. Even though there wasn’t a press during the medieval days the way there is now, such questions were relevant then.
“They still dealt with questions of what we might term ‘fake news,’” Nakashian said.
“In the medieval world, we have a few examples we can play around with,” Nakashian said, noting that if you’re talking about lies, there was plenty of that in medieval days.
The main narrative sources from the time consisted of chronicles, the history professor said, monastic authors or clerics writing a history of events, such as a year-by-year account. There, you’d run into publishing stories, anecdotes and other narratives that made a good tale but may have not been true.
One example is with Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose writings about the history of British kings helped to popularize many of King Arthur’s exploits, Nakashian explained. He was writing around the 1130s. A few years later, another historian, William of Newburgh, criticized the degree of truth in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Arthurian accounts.
“Most historians think he pretty much just made this up,” Nakashian said of Monmouth’s Arthurian tales, adding, “Generally speaking, there’s a lot of fake news in it.”
Another precursor to “fake news” was
with something that’s fake but still accurate, Nakashian explained, discussing charters that granted land during medieval times.
“Sometimes they were forged because you wanted the land,” he said. Other times, though, someone may have lost the original charter they truly had, or the land really was theirs but they didn’t have a charter.
A high profile example was the Donation of Constantine, which purported to have come from Roman Emperor Constantine and to have granted power over part of the Roman empire to the Pope. A cleric later showed that it could not have been written in the fourth century, Nakashian said.
“People questioned it for centuries,” he said.
Another example Nakashian intends to share highlights how contested political narratives are at the heart of the issue with “fake news” discussions.
“The last thing I’m going to talk about is what most fake news actually comes down to,” Nakashian said. That idea of the contested narrative seems to have been engaged with by fewer people then than it is now, where so many people take part in the discussion.
Nakashian says as in much of the study of history, this talk about “fake news” can remind us that this isn’t the first time people have considered such questions. Why do we fall victim to fake news? Why do we find it so easy to say an opponent is lying as opposed to just disagreeing? These are the types of questions with which we wrestle.
“We can better understand our own reactions and our own motivations,” Nakashian said.
(Admission: free for Texarkana Museums System members, $5 for non-members. All attendees should register through Ticketleap. com; TMS members should bring a membership card to the event. Space is limited. Registration closes on Wednesday.)