The “Le Mans Forgeries,” relating the history of the bishops of Le Mans from apostolic times to 840, have long been acknowledged to be tendentious, and many historians have sought to determine their date, authorship, and purpose. Walter Goffart has assembled these widely scattered and unevenly edited texts and has established their unity of composition, date, and the legal circumstances the forger hoped to exploit to serve the interests of his bishopric. He also provides a critical analysis of the Le Mans charters. His study is a notable contribution to source criticism and to the history of church property and its law in the Carolingian period.

Five complete manuscripts of Lucan, a Roman poet born in Spain in A.D. 39, exist from the ninth century. Because the manuscripts are, on the surface, closely related, a majority of them have been largely ignored. Harold Gotoff's monograph assesses the relationships apparent among these works, discussing the editorial history of Lucan and showing in great detail how the text of this important classical author was propagated during the Carolingian Renaissance. Medievalists will take particular interest in the pattern Gotoff finds in the practices and behavior of scribes and correctors in the Carolingian period.