Robert Baldauf

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Robert Baldauf was a Swiss philologist and a Privatdozent at the University of Basel during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1902 and 1903 he published two out of an intended four volumes under the general title of History and Criticism; the first and fourth volumes in the series. These two volumes are of interest to critics of chronology and written history. Baldauf managed to come to virtually the same conclusions as French scientist Jean Hardouin using an altogether different method, that of philological analysis.

Baldauf had studied the archives of the famous Swiss monastery of St. Gallen, formerly one of the key centres of Catholicism, and discovered traces of the barbaric library raid made by Poggio Bracciolini and a friend of his, both of them highly educated servants of the Roman curia. They purloined numerous manuscripts and books that were considered ancient from the library of this monastery (however, the manuscripts may date to a more recent epoch, which wouldn't preclude them from serving as prototypes for the manufacture of numerous "ancient" works by Poggio and his assistants).

One must also mention Baldauf's study of numerous presumably ancient manuscripts and the exposure of the same as being, for the most part, recent forgeries. Baldauf discovered parallels between the "historical" books of the Old Testament and the works of the mediaeval Romance genre as well as Homer's Iliad that were blatant enough to lead the scientist to the assumption that the text of both the Iliad and the Bible date from the late Middle Ages.

Some of the mediaeval chronicles ascribed to different authors resembled each other to such an extent that Baldauf was forced to identify them as works of the same author, despite the fact that the two documents were presumed separated chronologically by an interval of two centuries at least. At any rate, some of the expressions characteristic for Romantic languages that one finds in both documents fail to correspond with either of the alleged datings (one of them being the IX and the other the XI century). Apart from that, some of the manuscripts contain distinctly more recent passages, such as frivolous stories of endeavours in public steam baths (which the Europeans only became acquainted with during the late Reconquista epoch) and even allusions to the Holy Inquisition. Baldauf's study of the "ancient" poetry in Volume 4 demonstrates that many "ancient" poets wrote rhymed verse resembling that of the mediaeval troubadours. Unlike Hardouin, Baldauf is convinced that the verse of Horace is of mediaeval origin, pointing out German and Italian influences inherent in his Latin. Furthermore, Baldauf points out such pronounced parallels between the poetry of Horace and Ovid (who were presumably unaware of each other's existence) that one becomes convinced that the works of both belong to a third party – apparently, a much later author.

Robert Baldauf wasn't alone in his criticism of the style characteristic of the "ancient" authors. As early as 1847 Borber^[who?] expressed surprise about the striking similarity of the Druids and the Egyptian priests as described in Julius Caesar's De bellum Gallico, which he considers a later forgery; likewise De bellum civile by the same author.

Baldauf sums up his research in the following words: "Our Romans and Greeks have been Italian humanists." All of them – Homer, Sophocles, Aristotle and many other "ancient" authors, so different in our perception, hail from the same century, according to Baldauf. Furthermore, their home wasn’t in ancient Rome or Hellas, but rather Italy of the XIV-XV century. Baldauf avers that the entire history of the Ancient Greeks and Romans -- likewise the Biblical "history," which correlates with the above to some extent -- was conceived and introduced by the Italian humanists, as well as their colleagues and followers from other countries. Humanism, he says, has given us a whole fantasy world of antiquity and the Bible, as well as the early Middle Ages, which Baldauf also considered an invention of the humanist writers. This fictional history, initially drafted on parchment, was carved in stone and cast in metal; it has rooted itself in our perception to such an extent that no positivist criticisms can make humanity doubt its veracity.^{[citation needed]}