Jaromír Čelakovský a rukopisy (RKZ)

The basis of the value and scholarly position of J. Čelakovský with respect to the Manuscript of Dvůr Králové (MDK) and the Manuscript of Zelená Hora (MZH) was formed by his father František Čelakovský who was a long-life advocate of the authenticity of the Manuscripts. Jaromír Čelakovský, as suggested in his Memoires of 1871, considered the discovery of the MDK to be extremely important. Later representatives of Czech legal history – the university course of study, instituted primarily as a result of J. Čelakovský’s activities and efforts – claimed (1969) that J. Čelakovský had not got involved in the dispute over the authenticity of the Manuscripts initiated by Professor Gebauer (linguistics) and Professor Masaryk (sociology) in 1886. Such assumption still survives among legal historians and the purpose of this article is to cast doubts on this premise. This paper attempts to answer the question why T. G. Masaryk considered opinions published in the Národní listy newspaper in a series of articles between March and July 1886 to be opinions of J. Čelakovský although some of the articles were undersigned by J. Grégr and the others remained unsigned, and why Masaryk called those articles “legal defence of the Manuscripts” undoubtedly as an allusion to J. Čelakovský. Even after a decade the wider professional public attributed the authorship of one of unsigned articles to J. Čelakovský (published on 5th March 1886). As lawyer and until his death, Čelakovský considered the issue of the Manuscripts open (expressly for example in 1907, 1911). Our study of the literary legacy of J. Čelakovský in the Literary Archives of the Museum of Czech Literature has brought yet no indication that Čelakovský was preparing any material regarding the Manuscripts to be published under his own name. It leads to an assumption that Čelakovský undoubtedly intervened in the dispute over the Manuscripts in 1886/1887 but not under his own name.