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T o strengthen his dynastic links with the kingdom of Bohemia, Charles IV revived almost everything associated with its history and its church, including the Old Church Slavonic liturgy. In 1347 he founded the Slavonic Monastery (Monasterium Slavorum) and invited Benedictine monks from Croatia to practice the Slavonic liturgy in Prague. On March 29, 1372, the archbishop of Prague, John Očko of Vlašim, consecrated the monastery and dedicated it to the Virgin Mary and the Slavonic patrons Jerome, Cyril, Methodius, Adalbert, and Procopius. The ceremony was attended by the emperor, his son Wenceslas, many of his Luxembourg relations, and the whole court.1 The foundation and consecration of the Slavonic Monastery was part of the emperor’s grand plan to make Bohemia the spiritual and temporal heart of his vast empire. Practiced at the Sázava Monastery until its dissolution at the end of the eleventh century, the Slavonic liturgy embodied Bohemia’s providential role at the spiritual crossroads of eastern and western Christendom. A central figure in this revival was the founder of the original Sázava Monastery, the Benedictine abbot Procopius, whose cult became particularly popular around the middle of the fourteenth century. In fact, we might more accurately speak of several cults, since, as we shall see in the course of this chapter, the life of Saint Procopius meant different things to different people. The diversity of opinion about what a Christlike life should entail tended to divide along dichotomous reformist versus orthodox lines. For those who supported the Bohemian reform movement, the significance of Procopius’s life —as in any Christological typology — lay in his dedication to preaching and his espousal of poverty; for the Dominican friars at the university and within court circles, his principal importance derived from his activity as a lay preacher and as a sacerdotal dispenser of absolution; for the radical Hussites in the fifteenth century, the emphasis was placed on his anti-German role in driving out the foreign monks from the Sázava Monastery. The three extant Czech versions of Procopius’s life —two in prose and one in verse —exemplify these differing perspectives on Procopius’s life and ministry. Informing all three, however, is an attempt to reconcile the historical with the transcendental and the social with the theological aspects of the legend. For the Hussites and for their fourteenth77 CHAPTER 5 ✣ A Bohemian Imitatio Christi The Legend of Saint Procopius century forebears, Procopius was at once a local Bohemian saint and a universal exemplar of Christlike perfection. As David Aers has put it in connection with the imitatio Christi in Langland’s Piers Plowman, “The model and imitation of Christ contributes forcefully to the poet’s refusal to separate the spiritual from the social, the individual pursuit of the virtuous life, of salvation, from the pursuit of justice in communities where what might count as justice seem far from clear.”2 This social and religious vision of Procopius’s life has been occluded by Czech Marxist criticism, which emphasizes the secular and teleological aspect of the verse legend’s ideological message. I have argued elsewhere that this anachronistic perspective distorts the medieval understanding of human existence as a quest toward the perfect Christlike life.3 The principal aim of this chapter, then, is to explore with close reference to the verse Legend of Saint Procopius the manner in which it combines religious and social ideals to create a localized form of piety —a specifically Bohemian imitatio Christi—within the larger community of the Church universal.4 This aspiration has been defined by the prominent English historian John Bossy as the modest goal of the Hussite reformers of the fifteenth century.5 The Three Czech Versions and Their Latin Sources The oldest extant Latin version of his legend (dating from the eleventh to the twelfth centuries) is the so-called Vita s. Procopii antiqua, allegedly based on a lost Old Church Slavonic redaction (1061–67), the official language of the liturgy at the Sázava Monastery.6 The Vita antiqua was the source of the Vita s. Procopii minor on which all the subsequent Latin and Czech adaptations of the story are based. These vitae of Saint Procopius are extant in at least fifty manuscripts and reflect the growth and popularity of his cult in the mid–fourteenth century.7 The most important Czech version of the saint’s life is the verse Legend of Saint Procopius (c. 1350s). At 1,084 lines, it is by far...

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