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110 L ike the saints’ lives examined in the previous two chapters, the secular chivalric romance is a difficult genre to place into a social context since, by its very nature, it is concerned to evoke the Other World rather than this one. To discern the “real” within such genres one must take an oblique, lopsided look at what is being represented. Just as the hagiographic legend presents reality through the filter of religious values , so does the romance refract the social through an idealized world of chivalric ideals. In his pioneering study Mimesis: Dargestellte Wirklichkeit in der abendländischen Literatur (1948), Erich Auerbach pointed out that, unlike the medieval epic, which accurately reproduces the world of social reality, the otherworldly space of the chivalric romance provides no direct mimetic link to the real.1 Since Auerbach’s seminal definition of the romance genre first appeared nearly half a century ago, studies of the medieval romance have begun to suggest how this gap between ideal and reality might be bridged. Scholars have increasingly discerned in medieval romances not so much an absence of the real as a complex refraction of it through the distorting lens of chivalric ideology.2 Ideology does not correspond directly to reality but exists in an intermediate position between culture and the actual material conditions that bring it into being. Borrowing the term “acculturation” from the language of contemporary anthropology, Jane Taylor attempts to define this off-centered relationship between text and its social context as “a process whereby the socio-culturally unfamiliar is recast in familiar terms, so that the reader can understand systems and phenomena in a source text as corresponding to his own ideologies, preconceptions and behavior patterns .”3 Taylor goes on to argue that this ideological familiarization often functions in an unconscious fashion, manifesting itself through microcosmic detail rather than through the wholesale transformation of the original text. Thus the common assumption that epigonic adaptations are slavish, uninspired, and mechanical reproductions of their high courtly models is frequently based on a misconception of the adaptation and its author’s intentions. In this chapter, I shall examine the fourteenth-century Czech chivalric romances in precisely such terms of “acculturation” by placing less emphasis on the alleged aesthetic superiority of the GerCHAPTER 7 ✣ Bohemian Knights Reflections of Social Reality in the Czech Epic and Verse Romances man models and more on the relationship between the adaptation and the social context that produced it. Alexandreida Interest in the world of epic and romance in the Bohemian Lands can be dated to the second half of the thirteenth century, when the Czech kings, by then thoroughly germanized in language and culture, were beginning to emulate the chivalric and courtly tastes of the princes of the empire. Wenceslas I and his son Přemysl Ottokar II invited German poets to their court at Prague, the most celebrated of whom was Ulrich von Etzenbach , the author of a voluminous romance about Alexander the Great (in 28,000 verses!) that flatteringly compares Přemysl Ottokar with the Greek hero. This work was conceived and written in conformity with the fashionable chivalric ethos of the day. Alexander does not simply become a proto-Christian crusader; he also takes part in tournaments, seeks the favor of ladies, and undertakes aventiures in distant lands. The anonymous author of the Czech Alexandreida (c. 1290–1300) rejects this secular model of knighthood, preferring the prechivalric ideal of the miles Dei, the crusader who fights on God’s behalf. Probably written by a cleric attached to the household of a regional nobleman or perhaps by an educated nobleman himself, the Alexandreida arose in a provincial , noncourtly milieu. Its weltanschauung is quite distinct from —and even antipathetic to —Ulrich’s tale of exotic travels, jousts, and ladies’ favors. Its vision of Greece is not a fairy-tale world but recognizably the author’s own society: the landscape resembles that of medieval central Europe, Alexander’s knights are given Czech names, his military tactics are characteristically medieval, and even his coronation is modeled on that of the Prague ceremony. Above all, Alexander himself is an idealized Czech warrior-king who always keeps his nobles in his counsel and shuns the trappings of worldliness. The only description of a tournament in the Alexandreida is scathingly laconic: while describing the entertainments laid on for Alexander by the citizens of Babylon, the author states that these chivalric amusements lasted a long time (dlúhé chvílé, B, 178), thus punning...

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