The Donation of Constantine is the most outrageous and powerful forgery in world history. The question of its precise time of origin alone kept generations of researchers occupied. But, what exactly is the Donation of Constantine? To find the answer, it is necessary to approach the question on two different semantic levels: First, as the Constitutum Constantini, a fictitious privilege, in which, among other things, rights and presents were bestowed on the catholic church by a grateful Emperor Konstantin. Secondly, as a reflection of the Middle Age mindset, becoming part of the culture landscape midway through 11th century A.D. The author not only reinterprets the origin of this forgery (i.e. puts it down to the Franks’ opposition of Emperor Louis the Pious), but retells, as well, the history of its misinterpretation since the High Middle Ages. In an appendix, all relevant texts are printed in the original language, an English translation is provided.

Valla (1407-1457) was the most important theorist of the humanist movement. His most famous work is the present volume, an oration in which Valla uses new philological methods to attack the authenticity of the most important document justifying the papacy's claims to temporal rule.

The Donation of Constantine (Latin: Donatio Constantini) is a forged Roman imperial decree by which the 4th-century emperor Constantine the Great supposedly transferred authority over Rome and the western part of the Roman Empire to the Pope.

In The Making of Medieval Forgeries, Alfred Hiatt focuses on forgery in fifteenth-century England and provides a survey of the practice from the Norman Conquest through to the early sixteenth century, considering the function and context in which the forgeries took place. Hiatt discusses the impact of the advent of humanism on the acceptance of forgeries and stresses the importance of documents to medieval culture, offering a discussion of the relation of the various versions of the chronicle of John Hardyng to the documents he forged, as well as documents pertaining to the charters of Crowland Abbey and various bulls and charters connected with the University of Cambridge. A considerable portion of the book concerns the Donation of Constantine, which involves many continental writers, German, French, and Italian. The Making of Medieval Forgeries further discusses the 'multiplicity of audiences' for forgeries: those that produce, those that approve, and those that are hostile.

The collective volume Syriac Hagiography: Texts and Beyond explores several late-antique and medieval Syriac hagiographical works from the complementary perspectives of literature and cult.