This extensive and richly illustrated monograph charts the festivals, ceremonies, and rituals practised in the Kingdom of Bohemia during the late Middle Ages. Drawing on a wide range of surviving written and visual sources, a collective of leading Czech medievalists presents a multi-layered picture of the festivities, ceremonies, and ritual practices that took place across various social milieus in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The primary focus of the volume lies on princely and royal courts, where rituals—often assuming a sacral character—were employed most intensively.
Chapters by František Šmahel on royal funerals, by Václav Žůrek, who offers a fresh perspective on royal coronations, and by Martin Nodl, who addresses the previously neglected subject of betrothals and marriages, demonstrate that ritual behaviour at court acquired a distinctly ceremonial and festive form. It was at the Luxembourg court that norms and regulations emerged which were intended to shape ceremonial practices for immediate successors as well as for future generations.
Although the Czech source material did not allow the authors to answer all the questions raised by the dynamically developing scholarship of Western Europe, the volume’s consistent emphasis on comparison with German, French, English, Polish, and Hungarian contexts leads to the conclusion that—above all through the court of Emperor Charles IV—a rich spectrum of courtly festivals and ceremonies developed in the Bohemian lands, practices that had found only limited expression in earlier periods.
Author(s):
Martin Nodl – František Šmahel
Publisher: Argo
Language: Czech
Place: Prague
Year: 2014
ISBN: 978-80-257-0589-6