Preface

Summary

It is more than twenty years since I published Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society (1310–1420) (1998). The aim of that book was to familiarize the interested reader with the rich literature and culture of late medieval Bohemia. My argument was that Anne of Bohemia, who married King Richard II of England in January 1382 and was Queen of England for twelve years until her untimely death in 1394 at the age of twenty-eight, did not spring from a cultural and literary vacuum but from an international court culture in which German, Czech, Latin, and French all intermingled. The great Italian humanist Petrarch visited Anne’s father, Charles IV of Luxembourg, in Prague and was so impressed by the learning and erudition of the emperor and his courtiers that he likened them to the ancient Athenians.

In the present book I return to this international court culture of the late fourteenth century by focusing on the English court of Richard II (r. 1377–99). This time my project will consider the influence of Anne’s presence in England. I began this comparative project with my earlier monographs A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2007) and Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer’s Female Audience (2015). Those studies, however, only partially addressed the phenomenon of the international court culture to which Anne belonged and which she brought with her to England. In this more ambitious book I aim to build upon the valuable scholarship of Gervase Mathew, Nigel Saul, Andrew Taylor, David Wallace, Michael van Dussen, Peter Brown, Linda Burke, and Michael J. Bennett by considering the writings of Geoffrey Chaucer, the anonymous Gawain (and Pearl) poet, John Gower, and other poets associated with Richard’s court in the light of Anne’s presence in England. My argument will be that we can adequately appreciate the extraordinary achievement of these writers and the efflorescence of English art and literature in the last two decades of the fourteenth century only by placing these great writers in the larger context of the Bohemian influence exerted upon all aspects of English court life, including fashion, vernacular writing, and the visual arts.