The Donatio Constantini (ca. 8th century CE) is one of the most important forgeries in all the western world, arguably the most important in all of human history. Purportedly written in the fourth century, the document's guarantee was left unquestioned for hundreds of years and, in certain sectors, its authenticity is mustered to legitimate actions and discourse even to this day. Very likely commissioned by Constantine the Great, the “Donation” critically guaranteed that the papacy, at a time of its tenuousness, did indeed have authority over its historical Roman see, and, by dint of such a claim, geopolitically far beyond Italy. At moments when protestation swelled against the Church, when the papacy teetered towards being unseeded or superseded, the “Donation” could be mustered to contravene any and all arguments against its authority. Like the Green Mountain and the Queen's Court manuscripts (Rukopisy zelenohorsk ý a královédvorský), the Donatio ’s provenance was questioned from within and deep linguistic-philological research was employed to dispute its origin. The recurring disputations repeatedly opened up wounds that made visible the very core of the institution that “required” the retrograde creation of its own legitimacy.
Like the works collected in Queen's Court and Green Mountain M anuscripts, the Donation and, for that matter, The Song of Igor's Campaign, has proved historical relevance to the present day not despite, but sensationally, because the critically-generous issue of authenticity has attached itself to any and all discussion of the work. I would risk that the Church requires it still, by dint of the fact that the arguments that ensued over its authenticity were part and parcel of arguments about its matter. Historical disputes over the Donation keep the status of papal power, and the actions legitimated by it, ever valuable and emergent.
Similarly significant are the expert forgeries of nineteenth-century Czech romantic nationalists. Both the Green Mountain and the Queens's Court manuscripts’ forgery is traditionally attributed to Václav Hanka (and associates). Hanka was an individual of eminence, educated both in Prague and in the seat of the empire, Vienna. He knew first-hand the existential crisis facing the Czech language and its culture under Hapsburg rule. In what one could call a functionally desperate mood, Hanka founded a society whose aim was to preserve the Czech language; his colleagues were well familiar with his reactive Slavophilia and, though impassioned to make that stance known further afield, he declined his seat to the Imperial Diet in Vienna (unlike his compatriot Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk) rather than, let us say, fight the system while obeying it. Where Hanka may have failed as a politician, he thoroughly succeeded as a writer of literary fiction. Hanka created a mythos for a Czech culture on the brink, and it may not be too ostentatious to say that in gorgeously codifying a lie that was begging to be revealed, he saved Czech culture from erasure.
A publication of these masterful Czech forgeries, The Queen's Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts, is long overdue. In this collection, which includes annotations and an anthology of “Reviews, Criticism, and Polemics,” we finally have the full story in all its truth-telling fictions. Many choices made by the editor/translator are to be applauded, not least among them the dual language presentation of the manuscripts and the choice to include as an integral part of the publication the rich context that was the foment and fecund imagination of Czech nineteenth-century national romanticism. Those responsible for this collection could have followed the disappointing standard of debasing these discourses, not without a great deal of politesse, by placing them around the work and apart from the work itself by paratextualizing them (in an appendix, footnotes, endnotes, or marginalia). The choice to include the polemics, and to do so on equal footing with the manuscripts themselves, makes clear that the compilers are aware of the substantive mutual constitution of the work, the forgery, and the discourse both engender.
The translation work is truly accomplished. Translations of contestations to the manuscripts’ authenticity are also compelling, though there, for obvious reasons, the original Czech is not included. So many gems are available to the (growing) Anglophone reader—Josef Dobrovský’s keen “A liar has to have a good memory.” For the first time I cannot say enough about the overall excellence of The Queen's Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts, except to say that I cannot say enough.
The Queen's Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts offers up for the first time in English the Green Mountain and Queen's Court texts along with the fascinating history of Hanka, Antonín Vašek, Dobrovský, and Jan Gebauer, in the same volume. It brilliantly contextualizes the moment and mode of these manuscripts, the sense of urgency that activates them, and the discourse around legitimacy itself: the ironic, almost immediate, translation of the Old Czech manuscripts into German by Poles. Questions of legitimacy and hegemony, the works as such, the works as forgeries, the especial desire for legitimacy, all these are important not only to those who study Czech culture, but to all who are invested in the intersections between history and literature, between ethos and mythos. That being said, missing from The Queen's Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts is the historiographic, genealogical-historicist, and theoretical scaffolding that the craft of simulation appears to require. I do not see this lack as a dilemma, however. In fact, in not imposing such a framework and superstructure, the editor/translator has created a very effective pedagogical space for interrogating the very idea of the fake and fraudulent in national and literary politics, and allowed the reader to register the manuscripts within their own argument, both in the classroom and in independent researches.
Less productive a matter is the oscillating intonations of the two forewords. While I find both introductions to be quite cogent, the vagaries of the task itself—translating works that are themselves, in the broad sense, translations of translations of versions of an imagined language—has, perhaps naturally, affected the editorial and translatorial voices themselves so that if one were not already familiar with the genealogy of these works, one would vacillate between believing them exquisite forgeries or autonomous creative works with no pretension to authenticity. Yes, this wonder and confusion can be construed as the most important quality of the manuscripts themselves, but a stance, or the decision not to take one, ought to have been made more transparent. There are a few unfortunate typological errors: “Green Moutain” on page viii, but these are certainly easily rectified in a second edition, hopefully one that would be a paperback, priced affordably for students. Without a doubt I will choose to include this volume not only for courses in Czech literature but also European history, nationalism, and simulation as creative and/or propagandistic strategy.
The Queen's Court and Green Mountain Manuscripts has an import for a wide audience. It is clearly indispensable for the Slavicist and central Europeanist, but also for European historians, literary scholars, anthropologists, students of culture, and its genealogies; in short, for anyone who has ever been both skeptical and idealistic in the same thinking moment.
