Preface

Summary

THIS WORK IS an outcome of several years of research on the medieval lamentations of the Virgin Mary. I researched the Bohemian laments in my dissertation on medieval Bohemian literature and performance, defended at the Department of Theatre Studies, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic in 2017, and published it two years later with the Filosofia, Prague, thanks to the financial support of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. I have also dealt with the Bohemian laments in several studies published in English in scholarly publications in the Czech Republic and abroad. This book would not have been written without the encouragement of Pamela King, who gave me the confidence to write it and invaluable assistance in the whole process. It would also not have been written without the financial support of the Academy of Sciences from the AV 21 Strategy Programme. I was assisted by a large number of colleagues and friends in my research on the Marian Lament as a genre, as well as in preparation of this book, especially Tomáš Weissar, who helped me with the reading and translation of the Latin laments and liturgical manuscripts. Furthermore, discussions with him often made me aware of important points that I would otherwise have missed. Similarly, I am very grateful to Pietro Delcorno for his valuable suggestions and for the opportunity to publish part of my research in his project on the Central European Passion Devotion. I am also indebted to Jan Hon, Martin Bažil, and Klára Škrobánková for their help with the translation of the German, French, and Polish laments, respectively. I thank Alena Sarkissian and Martin Bernátek for their helpfulness and the space they gave me to work on the book, magnanimously limiting the scale of my other duties. I thank Evina Stein for her help in deciphering the illegible rubrics in the Lament of Roudnice, and Hana Vlhová-Wörner for drawing my attention to the evidence from Bohemia of the performance of a Marian composition in front of a statue of the Virgin Mary. My special thanks go to the anonymous reader of Arc Humanities Press, whose valuable comments were of immense help and spared me some embarrassing mistakes. All possible errors that remain in the text remain my sole responsibility.