Devotional Texts for Royal Princessesin Late-Medieval Bohemia

Abstract

By the eleventh century Bohemia had become a unified state underone ruler and Prague the center of religious, political, and commercial life. The cult of the martyred Duke Wenceslas and his grandmother Ludmila (the Bohemian proto-martyr) provided the ruling dynasty with two saintly figures from its own family and a focus for collective identity and devotion.¹ As in Western Europe, the twelfth century in Bohemia was a period of expanding education and humanism. It was at this time that the Prague cleric Cosmas wrote his important and influential Chronica Boemorum (Chronicle of the Czechs; ca. 1120), the central European equivalent of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regum Britanniae (The History of the Kings of Britain, 1135/6). Cosmas provided the ruling dynasty with the kind of mythic ancestry that Geoffrey furnished for the Anglo-Norman nobility. He elaborated the foundational story of Libuše,whoprophesiesthefoundingofPrague,andherhusbandPřemysl thePlowman,theallegedfounderofthePřemysliddynasty,muchinthe same way that Geoffrey made King Arthur the heroic precursor of the Norman rulers of England. Cosmas was a graduate of the famous school of rhetoric at Liège and steeped in classical learning.²