Julia Alpinula, Pseudo-Heroine of Helvetia: How a Forged Renaissance Epitaph Fostered a National Myth.

London, The Author, 2015.

8vo, (235 x 155 mm), pp. 72; four illustrations; in paper wrappers.

£15

Approximately:
US $18€17

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Julia Alpinula, Pseudo-Heroine of Helvetia: How a Forged Renaissance Epitaph Fostered a National Myth.

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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. In 2014 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.

ISBN 978-0-9933762-0-7

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