David Cooper (Slavic Languages Professor)

Yes.

And I think, in fact, that they believed that the history was there, but that it had been lost.

Because one of the effects of the religious wars around Czech religious reformation was devastation of manuscript holdings in Czech language, right?

Because the language was associated with heresy.

So the things got burned and they got thrown away.

And so I think they believed that they were recreating something that had, in fact, once existed.

And so these forgeries, were they passed off and people believed them for a very long time?

People believed them.

There were one or two experts that sort of expressed early skepticism.

But for the most part, they conformed to what people thought they should find and expected to find.

And so it really took, because one of the people involved in forging them, he was one of the leading experts in Old Czech language at the time.

And so it took a long time before people got better than him and enough better than him to say, hmm, these are not quite right.

They don't, you know, the language is not quite grammatically perfect in every way.

Interesting.

So you used like linguistics analysis to try to figure that out, stuff like that?

Yeah.

I mean, that was research that was done before I got involved with it.

So I, you know, I had to read up and sort of make sure that I understood that.

But yeah, I mean, linguistics is fundamental to sort of the proof of the forgery.

And they never found any direct evidence.