Conference Report: Chaucer in Bohemia 15th-16th June, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague

Four members of staff from the School of English – Professor Peter Brown, Professor Tony Edwards, Dr Ryan Perry and Dr Sarah James – attended the second workshop to be held as part of the Chaucer in Bohemia project, a collaboration initiated by Peter Brown and Dr Jan Čermák in Prague. Czech and English colleagues from the disciplines of literary studies, history and art history presented papers exploring the evidence for cultural exchange between England and Bohemia in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.

On day 1, Lenka Panušková explored the iconography of the Creation in the 14th-century Velislav Bible

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and demonstrated similarities to English bibles of the same period, as well as earlier Anglo-Saxon books. Sarah James examined the evidence for the transfer of Bohemian models of female sanctity to late-medieval England, while Marek Suchý discussed a set of accounts for a tour by Henry, Earl of Derby, to Prussia and the Holy Land, revealing that medieval English travellers spent large sums of money in Bohemia on wine and gambling, much as their modern counterparts do today. Tony Edwards, with Julia Boffey from Queen Mary, London, established the possible Bohemian contexts for one of Chaucer’s longer texts, the Legend of Good Women, and Jan Čermák offered some fascinating comparisons between Chaucerian and Bohemian lyric poetry.

The second day began with Helena Znojemská’s paper (read in her absence by Jan) exploring issues of ethnic and class division in the Alliterative Morte Arthure and the Czech Dalimil Chronicle. In his examination of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde Peter Brown pointed to evidence of cultural congruence in England and Bohemia, while Klára Petřiková pointed to generic, stylistic and lexical parallels in texts invoking the Boethian tradition in both countries. Finally Ryan Perry demonstrated that traditional scholarly approaches to Anglo-Bohemian cultural exchange, focusing almost solely on the traffic in heretical texts, require urgent reappraisal.

We also visited historical sites of great significance for this project: Karlstejn Castle, built by Emperor Charles IV, father of Anne of Bohemia

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and the Emmaus Monastery, established by Charles IV as a centre for the production of texts in Old Slavic.

A further meeting is planned for 2015, and the Centre for Medieval and Early Modern Studies also hopes to welcome Jan Čermák as a Visiting Professor in the interim.

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