Le Carpentier Fraud

Question

I propose to create a category for profiles affected by the frauds and fictions of Jean-Baptiste Le Carpentier (1606-1670). The published ones occur primarily in his Histoire généalogique des Païs-Bas, ou Histoire de Cambray et du Cambresis, published in 1664, but he also produced genealogies for private clients. The book traces many of the leading families of the Cambrai region in his day back to the Crusades and as part of that includes a forged charter describing the Tournament of Anchin in 1096. French Wikipedia has a good article on this fictional tournament.

Because it gives full Latin texts for charters his book has the appearance of a reliable source, but it has repeatedly been shown to be deficient:

• Escallier in his L'Abbaye d'Anchin. 1079-1792 (1852) demonstrated that several of the charters used anachronisms or carried impossible dates for the people mentioned.
• Goethals in his Miroir des Notabilites Nobiliaires de Belgique, des Pays-Bas et du Nord de la France (1857, 1862) under Malapert says "this is a very inaccurate-book and unworthy of the confidence he enjoys, we have acquired the evidence. Our wish is to restore truth throughout, without respect to persons. We particularly imposed upon ourselves the onerous task of revising with scrupulous care the misleading and deceptive work of Jean le Carpentier, defrocked canon." (p.604 my translation).
• Meyer, Paul, 1862, Observations grammaticales sur quelques chartes fausses en langue vulgaire. In: Bibliothèque de l'école des chartes. Tome 23. pp. 125-138. doi: 10.3406/bec.1862.445816. shows that Carpentier must have falsified some of the charters he cites. Meyer also quotes the historian Charles D'Hozier (1640-1732) "il n'y a livre au monde qui soit si plein de faussetés, d'ignorances, d'absurdités, de confusions et d'extravagances qu'il y en a de la première page à la dernière des deux volumes de cette Histoire de Cambrai." (There is not a book in the world that is so full of falsehoods, of ignorance, of absurdities, of confusions and of extravagances than there is from the first to the last page of the two volumes of that History of Cambrai.)

There seem to be relatively few direct citations of Le Carpentier on WikiTree, but his work has been copied in later works. It is, for example, ultimately a large part of the basis for the medieval De Marets lineage given in Voorhis Demarest The Demarest Family (1964), which is the basis for most of what is on WikiTree for the ancestors of Marets-1 Jacques (Marets) des Marets Sr (abt. 1480 - abt. 1522). This is a family I am currently working on.

Has anyone else come across profiles affected by this fraud?

Answer 1

Interesting.  Someone should create a profile sticker for this famous, or rather infamous, fraudulent scholarship.  Or maybe a better sticker would be "Le Carpentier Fraud-Free Profile"  for the profiles of the ancestors of those family lines potentially affected by his works.  It would show that the particular profile was checked for Le Carpentier connected sources and found to be unhampered by his works.

Or in the same vein, but a different tack, having a profile 
"mark of the demon" sticker showing the profile has yet to clean Le Carpentier-related iffy information from its biography and source list.  It would help those who are unaware of the issue.  I bet there are more uninformed wiki people than one would hope.  Most of us are not professional historians.

Comments

It sounds like this would be an excellent additional subcategory under Frauds and Fabrications.  The challenge of fraudulent genealogy is that the most effective fraudsters weave together a tapestry of truth and fiction, of real people and events and fake people and events, so that much extra work is required to sort out what is true and what is not about each person's profile.  For this reason the category should be placed on all profiles which might be affected by the fraud, and the profile's narrative section on "Research Notes" should discuss which "facts" often associated with the person have been proved false.  For such profiles, in-line sourcing for each fact is especially important, so that the reader will know that a particular fact came from a legitimate source and not the fraudulent one.

For this purpose a category seems a better option than a sticker, because you want to be able to click on the category and see listed all the profiles that have been, or may be, affected by the particular fraud.

The category page itself should have just enough information to make it clear what profiles should receive the category.  It would be excellent to link this category page to a free-space page giving the excellent detail you've provided above!

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Thanks Jack. I have created a space page for Carpentier Frauds and the appropriate category.