Rudolf Hertwig, Pseudo-Originale und Einzelblattkopien, Wege zu einer Perzeptionsgeschichte der äußeren Merkmale fränkischer Herrscherurkunden. Monumenta Germaniae Historica Schriften, 85. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2025, XXXIII, 411 pp., 21 color images.

Nineteenth, and early twentieth-century editors of medieval charters focused much of their attention on distinguishing between legitimate and forged documents in an effort to provide a solid foundation on which to develop historical accounts, and particularly those dealing with law and property. To this end, textual editors developed a wide range of analytical tools, including paleographical analysis, sigillography, and a keen appreciation of the formal structure of charter texts and their various elements. These distinctions between real or true charters and forged documents had a profound effect on the use of the latter by historians, who often rejected their content as “anachronistic.” In the post-war period, however, historians came increasingly to accept that forged documents could provide very important insights regarding both the times in which they were produced and also the ways in which contemporaries perceived the past. A largely separate path of scholarly inquiry, which developed from the 1980s onward, emphasized the ways in which the external features of charters served not only to validate them as authentic to contemporaries (and subsequently to modern textual editors), but also served a medium of communication between the ruler and his subjects.