A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (review)

Alfred Thomas began putting Bohemia back on the map for English literary historians with his previous book Anne's Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420 (1998). The kingdom had begun disappearing from the political as well as the mental map of Europe in 1620 with the loss of the Protestant army at the Battle of the White Mountain near Prague, and its position further eroded during the course of the Thirty Years' War. After its nineteenth-century status as a "colonized country," the Czechoslovak Republic emerged in 1918 under the Treaty of Versailles only to fall victim to Nazi occupation in the 1930s, and then to disappear again on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain for most of the remainder of the twentieth century. The Czech Republic's freedom from Soviet domination has liberated cultural historians, too, to envisage more clearly the nation's centrality in Europe, especially during the medieval and Renaissance periods covered by the book under review, when Bohemians and Englishmen tended to view each other's country as synonymous with the utopian ideals of the early Church.

In the process of returning the kingdom to the heart of empire, not its fringes, Thomas focuses his discussion upon two fairly well-known but problematic literary connections between England and Bohemia. First, there is the question of Geoffrey Chaucer and Anne of Bohemia. In 1382 Richard II of England wedded the daughter of King Charles IV of Luxembourg, the Holy Roman Emperor who made Prague his residence and capital. The marriage alliance fueled King Richard's own imperial ambitions that survived Queen Anne's death in 1394 but contributed to his own over-reaching and deposition in 1399. She had arrived with a large entourage of Bohemians who brought with them to far-off, "marginal" England the high styles of the Continent, including ladies riding side-saddle and a passion for decorating with pearls, hence a proliferation of art and literature celebrating pearls, including the Middle English masterpiece Pearl (pp. 54–64). In terms of work already begun by Paul Strohm and David Wallace, Queen Anne emerges as a plausible "cultural mediatrix" channeling much of the refinement that would encourage artistic achievements like Wilton Diptych and literary masterpieces like Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde. Scholars have long recognized Queen Anne as the model for Queen Alceste in Chaucer's later work The Legend of Good Women so that her inspiration, including some important ingredients of Italian humanism in her cultural baggage, can now be reckoned to run even deeper in the poetic brilliance of the age.

Though devoutly orthodox, Queen Anne's alleged practice of reading the Bible in the vernacular languages of German and Czech emboldened followers of the reform-minded theologian John Wyclif to argue in favor of English Biblical translations. The nexus of religious dissent, forged during the fourteenth century, extended into the next century when Oxford scholar Jerome of Prague copied several of Wyclif's works and took them back to Bohemia where they were avidly read by John Hus. During 1407–08, two Bohemian students arrived in England for the express purpose of contacting Lollard centers at Kemerton and Braybrooke in order to acquire more Wycliffite works to take home, with the result that some of the radical theologian's texts would survive only in Prague. Encouragement for Czech reform would continue from the notorious English Lollards Richard Wyche and Sir John Oldcastle, though King Sigismund would prove as ruthless at stamping out heresy as his English counterpart Henry V. Radical Hussites, such as the Taborites with their pacifism and the Adamites with their sexual primitivism, paved the way for the Bohemian Brethren of the sixteenth century with their belief in a strict separation of church and state reaching all the way to Protestant America. One of the gems of this volume is a close reading of the fifteenth-century Bohemian satire "The Wycliffite Woman...