The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture by Alfred Thomas

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture by Alfred Thomas Elizabeth Allen alfred thomas, The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. 225. isbn: 978-1-8438-4566-9. $105. Over more than two decades, Alfred Thomas has brought to light for an English readership the international court culture of medieval Bohemia and its influence in England. Anne's Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310–1420 (University of Minnesota Press, 1998) took Anne's marriage to Richard II as the justification for a masterful survey of Czech literature with an eye to inviting comparisons with English literature. Thomas's subsequent work on Czech and English literature, A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cornell University Press, 2007), cemented this essential scholarly project of making known in English a thoroughly cosmopolitan eastern European literary history; a deeper dive into the Bohemian connections to Chaucer's works came in Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer's Female Audience (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). From Thomas' erudite and meticulous body of work, scholars of late-medieval English literature have gained crucial insight into the cultural relations between [End Page 158] England and Bohemia. Thomas' work is essential to an important twenty-first century scholarly undertaking—spearheaded by David Wallace (Europe: A Literary History) and taken further by scholars like Candace Barrington (Global Chaucers) and Marion Turner (Chaucer: A European Life)—to widen the context of English literary culture to include all of Europe and indeed, the rest of the globe. In his present monograph on the subject, Thomas details Bohemian art, literature, and statecraft in order to pursue readings of late fourteenth-century works by Chaucer, Gower, the writer of the Alliterative Morte Darthur, and the Pearl poet. The Court of Richard II and Bohemian Culture is a handsome volume: printed on clay-covered paper, it contains 40 high-resolution, full color in-line illustrations. These visual materials draw a particularly vivid picture of the ties between Bohemia and England: the shared materials, styles, and themes which, Thomas argues, emphasize not so much national identities as 'familial and dynastic affiliations that transcended the west-east European divide' (p. xvi). This book consists of four chapters and a conclusion. In Chapter One, Thomas establishes that Richard II's court found creative inspiration in the multilingualism of Anne's Bohemian relatives, especially her father, Emperor Charles VI, and her half brother, King Wenceslas IV. This political link creates occasions for reading the English poetry of the late fourteenth century in an international context. In Chapter Two, Thomas treats Anne as the real-life corollary to Venus in Gower's Confessio Amantis and to Alceste in Chaucer's Legend of Good Women, where the 'collaboration' with the patron 'is clearly not working out' (p. 71). In a series of short sections, Thomas explores the literary culture of female patronage in other works by Chaucer and by other authors including Dante, Petrarch, and Machaut. Chapter Three turns to more sustained readings of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Alliterative Morte Darthur, arguing that both poems, far from provincial, register the international court culture he describes. In Gawain's seduction scenes, he finds a reflection of Robert de Vere's scandalous affair with Anne's lady in waiting, Agnes Lancecrona; in the Morte, he finds in King Arthur's grief a reflection of Richard II's grief for de Vere upon his death. In both poems Thomas finds an ambivalence about the moral and political values that international court culture seems to embrace. Chapter Four finds that Pearl's 'curious blend of consolatio and courtly love motifs' (p. 167) registers links to Bohemian architectural, visual, and poetic texts: Karlstein Castle outside Prague, and the Czech Legend of St. Catherine of Alexandria. Here and in the book's conclusion, Thomas describes Richard's political ambition and his investment in the ideology of sacral kingship as thoroughly embedded in an international court culture shared by England and Bohemia—an international culture that, after Richard's death, gave way to the comparative insularity of the Lancastrians. Thomas' work proceeds by testing associations (as opposed...