True and False: The Medieval French Publications of Charles-Joseph Richelet

The nineteenth-century fascination with publishing medieval French texts inspired several hoaxes. The most interesting of the fakers was Charles-Joseph Richelet (1804–1850). He alternated between hoaxes and authentic texts, and—without really trying—sowed enormous confusion along the way, even managing to infect dictionaries of Old French down to the 1970s. The article concludes with the first complete bibliography of Richelet’s true and false medieval French publications; the rare first state of one of the pamphlets is described here for the first time.