The book brings a first detailed account in English of the forged medieval Czech manuscripts, allegedly discovered between 1816 and 1849 by Václav Hanka, Josef Linda and their friends. The core texts are two fragmentary collections of poems, the Queen’s Court Manuscript (Rukopis královédvorský) and the Green Mountain Manuscript (Rukopis zelenohorský), dated to the thirteenth and tenth centuries respectively. As sacred texts of the nineteenth-century Czech cultural and political emancipation movement called the National Revival, the Manuscripts attracted attention of European writers, politicians and scholars (e.g., J. W. Goethe, John Bowring, Alexander Sishkov, Krystyn Lach Szyrma). They were soon translated into thirteen European languages and inspired many artworks. Despite their significant influence on the Czech Romantic culture and nationalist ideology, the Manuscripts soon became subject to a series of authenticity controversies culminating in the 1880s with the confirmation of their inauthenticity by a team of researchers led by Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk, later the first president of Czechoslovakia.

The Introduction mentions several objectives of the book: The first one is to return the Manuscripts “to their rightful, prominent place in the history of Czech literature, culture, society, and scholarship” (7). The second purpose is “to place the Czech experience with forgery and mystifications into the broader developments of European history” (7). The third aim is to deepen the examination of “the history of the manuscripts and their poetics that seemed quite important but neglected” (7). Finally, the book claims to pose “a few questions and problems that aim to open up some new areas in the study of the manuscripts and their context” (7).

In keeping with these aims, the Manuscripts are approached from several angles. The first chapter views them in historical and comparative terms (along with James Macpherson’s Ossian poems and some Romantic forgeries), tracing the changes in the pre-Romantic and Romantic understanding of authorship, authenticity and artistic creation. The second chapter focuses on the poetics of epic poems, discussing both the similarities with and differences from the oral epic poetry of Homer, and the South as well as the East Slavs (in the research of Milman Parry, Albert B. Lord, and John Miles Foley). The analysis shows what makes the forgers’ appropriations of the oral-formulaic tradition successful, and where they fail. The third chapter concentrates on the role of translation, and especially “pseudotranslation” (117–45), as “an important technique of mystifications” (27). It offers a plausible explanation of the process of the creation and subsequent editing of the Manuscripts. The last chapter examines “the cult of the manuscripts,” its “quasi-religious” (27) and ritual nature, and asks a problematic question (neglecting the differences between the religious and secular imagining of communities) whether the cult might substitute instutionalized religion, which played a great role in the Polish or South Slavic national emancipation movements, but not in the Czech National Revival.

The chief value of the book consists in its mediatory role. It makes accessible the scholarship of the Manuscripts to an English-speaking readership, focusing on the contribution of recent scholars, including Vladimír Macura or the team of the Institute of Czech Literature led by Dalibor Dobiáš. As a result, the argument seems often derivative. The lack of detailed knowledge of Ossian scholarship in the first chapter is evident from the biographical information on James Macpherson, whose patron was never David Hume (31) but John Home.

The Chronology section fails to mention the first English translation of the Queen’s Court Manuscript poem “Zaboy, Slawoy, and Ludeck” in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (vol. 10, no. 55) in September 1821 with an introduction by a Polish translator and philosopher Krystyn Lach Szyrma comparing Ossian poems to the Manuscripts and Slavic oral poetry.

Finally, a problematic aspect of the treatment of the Czech nationalist movement should be mentioned. The meaning of “nation” in the U.S. context significantly differs from the Czech usage, where “nation” (národ) is a synonym for “people” (lid), an ethnocentric community represented as a collective body. To interpret the Manuscripts as “the voice of the Czech people in its oral traditional form,” and the expression of “unified Czech nationhood” (41) is not only anachronistic, but also objectionable at the time of a resurgence of violent nationalism.