Preface

Summary

This translation of one of the most important works of medieval Czech literature builds upon my previous attempts to draw Bohemian culture of the fourteenth century into the larger framework of what art historians sometimes refers to as the “International Gothic.” As I argued in my earlier book The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture: Literature and Art in the Age of Chaucer and the Gawain Poet (London, 2020), the Ricardian court that attracted Geoffrey Chaucer and the Gawain poet makes little sense when understood in the narrow terms of modern English national identity. Medieval courts were cosmopolitan places, and this holds especially true for the glittering Prague court of Emperor Charles IV in the second half of the fourteenth century. The thesis of this study is that the Czech Legend of St Catherine of Alexandria was not only written for the imperial court of Prague (and perhaps even commissioned by Emperor Charles himself) but itself exemplifies the international complexion of that court. Of special importance is the influence of Italian trecento painting and German mysticism on the development of Bohemian culture during the reign of Emperor Charles, and on this text in particular. Just as medieval writing in English has traditionally been placed within the academic canon of “English literature,” so has its equivalent written in medieval Czech been misleadingly placed within a canon of Czech literature that only came into being in the nationalist period of the nineteenth century. Just as writing in medieval English coexisted alongside writing in (Anglo-Norman) French in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, so did Czech and German writing cohabit within Bohemia and Moravia in the later medieval and early modern periods. The author of our Czech legend would have been steeped in German mystical writings and would, like all clerical writers, have been a fluent reader of German and Latin, a proficiency, which, as we shall see, was often shared by his lay readers.