Brought to you by Hopkins at Home and the Krieger School of Arts & Sciences

Books, Authenticity, and the Truth:
The history of misinformation, from the Renaissance to today

We are living through a crisis in how we take in information. Bombarded by information of all sorts coming at us on phones, tablets, and computer screens, it can be difficult to make sense of it all and harder still to determine whether something is true or false, authentic or inauthentic. The scale and speed of the change in media that we are undergoing is unprecedented in human history. Nevertheless, people in the past have faced moments of crisis – moments when writing seemed unreliable, when the format of written information changed, and when new publication formats forced reevaluations of the nature of truth.

In this virtual seminar, Christopher Celenza, Dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences, and Earle Havens, Director of The Virginia Fox Stern Center for the History of the Book in the Renaissance, will present selected texts from the Sheridan Libraries that illuminate the place of writing, books, and the search for truth and evaluate how the history of books and information can help us in our current quest to make sense of our world.