Jean Hardouin, Enrico Noris and Numismatic Chronology in the Republic of Letters, c. 1690

This article examines the historical context behind the controversial ‘conspiracy theory’ of the Jesuit Jean Hardouin (1646–1729), who, in 1693, argued on the basis of numismatic evidence that all but a very small number of ancient texts were forged in the late Middle Ages. I argue that in order to better understand this apparently fantastical theory we need to study the very specific numismatic and theological debates in which Hardouin first mobilised it. In particular, I demonstrate the importance of Hardouin’s bitter polemical debates with rival numismatists, above all the French doctor Jean Foy-Vaillant and the Italian theologian Enrico Noris, as well as the importance of his fierce opposition, as a Jesuit, to Noris’s Augustinianism. In doing so, I highlight how even antiquarian and numismatic scholarship, often presented as being supra- or pan-confessional, was still inescapably shaped by more underlying theological differences which informed how scholars viewed the value and uses of historical scholarship and historical ‘knowledge’ more generally.