-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Jeremy King, David L. Cooper. The Czech Manuscripts: Forgery, Translation, and National Myth., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 456–457, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae598
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
As The Czech Manuscripts explains, a rare find surfaced in Bohemia in 1817. Soon the Queen’s Court Manuscript (QCM), a fragment comprising about a dozen poems and songs, was dated to the thirteenth or fourteenth century—which made it the oldest known Czech-language document. The following year, another discovery, the Green Mountain Manuscript (GMM), offered a glimpse several centuries deeper into a Czech-language past. Together the QCM and GMM attested to the existence of an unexpectedly rich literary culture with an epic poetic tradition that honored a mythic age when pagan natives had lived in harmony and stood firm against invaders. Adherents of the fledgling Czech movement rejoiced, seeing in the manuscripts a historical counterweight to recent masterpieces of German-language literature for which there were no Czech equals. After all, Czech now figured largely as a language of non-elites, often illiterate. Yet not all was lost. The new evidence of a glorious past helped to inspire many Bohemians to contribute to the “rebirth” of a Czech “nation” defined by ancestral language. Over the following decades, the manuscripts became sacred texts of an increasingly confident Czech national movement.
