Vážení kolegové,

dovolujeme si vás pozvat na přednášku prof. Alfreda Thomase z University of Illinois na téma Chaucer's Bohemia. Přednáška se bude konat v úterý 15. prosince od 14.10 do 15.45 na Filozofické fakultě MU v Brně (Janáčkovo náměstí 2A, místnost N41).

Plakát akce najdete zde: Chaucer's Bohemia.pdf

ABSTRACT:

Although Geoffrey Chaucer, author of the Canterbury Tales, has been historically designated “the father of English literature,” he saw himself more as a European than an English poet. The fact that the Queen of England during Chaucer's activity at the court of Richard II was Anne of Bohemia (1366-94), daughter of Emperor Charles IV, encouraged Chaucer to think of himself in this cosmopolitan fashion. Significantly, Chaucer compliments Queen Anne at several points in his work, most notably in Troilus and Criseyde and in the prologue to The Legend of Good Women. Clearly, he envisaged her as an imagined, if not an actual, patron of his oeuvre. Alfred Thomas argues that Bohemia played a powerful role in Chaucer’s creative imagination. If this Bohemian influence has been overlooked in past scholarship, this has more to do with cold-war perceptions of twentieth-century east-central Europe as an appendage of the Soviet Empire than as the glittering cultural and political heart of the Holy Roman Empire, as it was perceived to be in Chaucer’s England.

BIO:

Alfred Thomas is Professor of English and Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is a specialist in medieval Czech literature and literary relations between Bohemia and England from Chaucer to Shakespeare. His published books include Anne’s Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310-1420 (1998); A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare (2007); The Bohemian Body: Gender and Sexuality in Modern Czech Culture (2007); Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory and the City (2010); Shakespeare, Dissent, and the Cold War (2014), and Reading Women in Late Medieval Europe: Anne of Bohemia and Chaucer’s Female Audience (2015). He is currently working on the GawainPoet and the International Court Culture.