Unauthenticated letters in late Roman North African disputes: forgeries or negotiation strategies? Becca Grose (St Andrews)

**Abstract**

In the letters of Augustine and other North African religious figures, we find multiple mentions of suspect letters — letters missing signatures, seals or other common and expected forms of authentication. Scholars have tended to follow Augustine and his peers in dismissing these letters as rather incompetent forgeries and to characterise the wider landscape of North African religious disputes as one in which forgery was endemic. In this paper, I use recent work on letter bearers and their role in letter exchanges to revisit this assumption. I argue that such letters were intentionally unauthenticated by material means, but that their authenticity was verifiable by other means. In the remainder of the paper, I discuss various hypotheses as to how and why such a model may have evolved, and what it tells us about the particular problems of communication and dispute in late Roman North Africa.


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