State reforms in the Habsburg Monarchy and the receding authority of the Church in science and education provoked, from the mid-18th-century, an upsurge of interest in Bohemian/Czech history and a wave of text editions. These projects supported a critical inquiry of older authorities and bestowed new prestige on patriotically-minded scholars. A prominent philologist and text editor in this period was Gelasius Dobner (Wenceslai Hagek a Liboczan Annales Bohemorum, 1761-82; Monumenta historica Boemiae nusquam antehac edita, 1765-85). Slightly later, Josef Dobrovský edited Cosmas’s Chronica Boëmorum (1787) together with František Martin Pelcl (1734–1801), as part of a Scriptores rerum Bohemicarum series. These editions were politically far from inconsequential. Pelcl’s edition of Bohuslav Balbín’s Dissertatio apologetica pro lingua slavonica, praecipue bohemica (1775) presented an important baroque defence of the Czech language to the public; his edition of Balbin’s Bohemia docta (1776-80) became the subject of a significant dispute about ancient Bohemian history and how to study it.

Other projects by Pelcl, František Faustin Procházka and others were intended to bring instructive and valuable Czech written works (and their classical language) of the pre-Counter-Reformation period back into public circulation. This broad editorial interest included even unavailable or forbidden works like the Kronika boleslavská (“Boleslav chronicle”, also known as the “Chronicle of Dalimil”, with its anti-German elements), edited by Procházka in 1786, or Comenius’s Protestant Labyrint světa a ráj srdce (“Labyrinth of the world and paradise of the heart”, 1631), reprinted by Václav Stach (1754–1831) in 1782. In this respect, editorial efforts were also close to translations or republications of older literary writings intended to reacquaint modern readers with the country’s Golden Age; thus Ignaz Cornova’s German translation of Paul Stransky's (originally Latin) Staat von Böhmen, 1792-1803, in Czech as late as 1893. On the other hand, the question of medieval poetry in the Bohemian Lands engrossed, first German and then Czech writers, who sought to vindicate the authority of vernacular poetry on the basis of bardism (with King Wenceslas II as a Minnesanger).

These editorial efforts continued into the 19th century. Dobrovský’s work on the vitae and liturgical writings of SS Cyril and Methodius was important in the study of Old Church Slavonic and for the development of a (nationally Moravian or generally Slavic) historicist sense of early Christianity (although Dobrovský himself later became more sceptical about the continuity of the Cyril and Methodius tradition in the Bohemian Lands). However, Enlightenment historiography and its criticism of fabulations was challenged by the emerging Romantic generation. A new reprint of Václav Hájek of Libočany’s Kronika česká (1818-23; previously edited by Dobner, now by Josef Linda, 1789–1834) influenced the development of the Romantic historical novel in Czech.

Václav Hanka’s Starobylá skládánie (“Ancient compositions”, 1817-24) turned attention to the earlier, pre-Humanist period, also for Czech-language writings. This collection, inspired by German examples, contained important medieval texts, such as Tkadleček (“The weaver”, 1824) and Dcerka (“Daughter“, 1825; the first modern Czech edition of Jan Hus), but also included Romantic mystifications, notoriously the Manuscript of Dvůr Králové (1818), allegedly from the turn of the 13th/14th century; he also introduced other, damaged texts.

The initial popularity and subsequently the protracted scandals around the counterfeit Manuscripts of Dvůr Králové and Zelena Hora, and their great impact on the historical imagination of Czech national Romanticism, are a matter of notoriety. The climate of Romantic Nationalism favoured broadly conceived and ambitious Slavic projects, including efforts to retrieve, publish and celebrate representative works with a nationally and ethnic (Slavic) inspirational value. Dobrovský had already shown an early interest in the Tale of Igor’s Campaign. Hanka's other initiatives, such as his efforts to republish the so-called Chronicle of Dalimil (early 14th century), were initially thwarted by the censor; the chronicle could appear in this edition only in 1848-51. As librarian of the National Museum, Hanka continued to have access to old manuscripts and prints, and some of his editions of real and forged documents, as waymarks for further study of the Czech past, appeared in the prestigious Museum journal.

These editions appeared as editorial methods and literary historiography were modernizing across Europe. Romantic editions like the Manuscript of Dvůr Králové of 1829, which reconstructed the alleged original verse of the work, no longer lived up to the expectations of their scholarly contemporaries. Among the pioneers of a more modern approach was František Palacký, who published editions from the Hussite period. A new publishing platform was provided by scholarly periodicals such as Časopis Vlastenského Muzea (1827) and the Archiv český (founded in 1840). Paradoxically, the methodologically innovative edition Die ältesten Denkmäler der böhmischen Sprache (1840, by Palacký and Pavel Josef Šafárik) included the Manuscript of Zelená Hora, and among the documents of early Czech statehood there were counterfeits as well as genuine material. In Moravia, Antonín Boček (1802–1847), the province’s historiographer and archivist and Palacký's peer and competitor, founded the Codex diplomaticus et epistolaris Moraviae in 1836. Again, even in this important work, the interpretation of the medieval Moravian past relied on inauthentic material.

These methodologically innovative editions appealed, not only to a scholarly audience, but also (as in the case of Hanka) to a wider Czech readership. Šafárik edited historical and literary material both from Old Czech sources as well as from South Slavic ones. His Výbor z literatury české (“A selection of Czech literature”) appeared in an initial volume in 1840, with a second volume published in 1857 by Karel Jaromir Erben. Erben, who studied and edited historical sources across regional archives, published Czech and Moravian diplomatic documents in Regesta diplomatica nec non epistolaria Bohemiae et Moraviae (1855), as well as works from the Hussite period: Knihy šestery by Tomáš ze Štítného (“Six books on general Christian affairs”, 1852) and three volumes of Jan Hus’s writings, Spisy Husovy (1865-68). In 1860 he published a rediscovered vita of St Catherine, Život svaté Kateřiny (1860), which became a classic of the Czech Middle Ages and which altered the appreciation of medieval Czech literature (somewhat vague until then).

Editorial activities developed further around 1860, with scholarly editions of historical documents by academics like Matthias Pangerl (1834–1879) and Josef Emler (1836–1899). They published the first volume of Fontes rerum Bohemicarum (a project already put forward by Palacký) in 1871-73, and modernized the department of auxiliary historical sciences at Prague University. (Although a Verein für die Geschichte der Deutschen in Böhmen was founded in 1862, it was affected to a much lesser degree by editorial activities.) It was around this time (1860-88) that the debate exposing of the Manuscript of Dvůr Králové as a modern forgery intensified. The new editorial principles were also applied to literary texts, both ancient (Old Czech) and modern. Ignác Leopold Kober’s publishing house issued a Národní bibliothéka (“National library“) in 1869-95, including 35 Czech writers. These editions, purist in tendency as they were, were also used in schools as models of Czech history and of refined Czech language usage.