JULIA ALPINULA, PSEUDO-HEROINE OF HELVETIA: HOW A FORGED RENAISSANCE EPITAPH FOSTERED A NATIONAL MYTH.
- London, United Kingdom: Bernard Quaritch, 2015.
- 8vo
- paper wrappers
- 72 pages
Price: $25.00 other currencies
Order Nr. 127033
Julia Alpinula is a legendary Swiss heroine, whose pathetic fate in AD 69 inspired popular historians, dramatists, artists, and poets including an infatuated Byron over a period of more than two hundred years. Her very existence, however, was based entirely on a funerary inscription first published in 1588 and ultimately shown to be a humanist forgery. Julia Alpinula is a fully documented account of her Romantic celebrity, the exposure of the Alpinula myth, and the identification of its scholarly perpetrator.
Arthur Freeman is a rare book dealer and writer living in London. Last year Quaritch published his Bibliotheca Fictiva: a Collection of Books and Manuscripts Relating to Literary Forgery 400 BC AD 2000. Julia Alpinula is a footnote to that book.