New essays examining Bohemia as a key European context for understanding Chaucer's poetry. Chaucer never went to Bohemia but Bohemia came to him when, in 1382, King Richard II of England married Anne, daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, Charles IV. Charles's splendid court in Prague was renowned across Europe for its patronage of literature, art and architecture, and Anne and her entourage brought with them some of its glamour and allure - their fashions, extravagance and behaviour provoking comment from English chroniclers. For Chaucer, a poet and diplomat affiliated to Richard's court, Anne was more muse than patron, her influence embedded in a range of his works, including the Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, the Legend of Good Women and Canterbury Tales. This volume shows Bohemia to be a key European context, alongside France and Italy, for understanding Chaucer's poetry, providing a wide perspective on the nature of cultural exchange between England and Bohemia in the later fourteenth century. The contributors consider such matters as court culture and politics, the writings of Richard Rolle, artistic style, Troy stories, historiographic writing and travel narrative; they highlight the debt Chaucer owed to Bohemian culture, and the affinities between English and Bohemian literary production, whether in the use of Petrarch's tale of Griselde, the iconography of the tapster figure, or satires on the Passion of Christ.

The common denominator of the texts collected in this volume is the (Art) History of the pre-modern period and gender perspective; to a certain degree the Czech milieu also, although not all the contributions focus on local issues. The book is divided into four parts, based on area of interest, time frame and research perspective. The first part sheds light on the state of research in the field of women's history and implementation of the concept of gender and highlights a certain paradigmatic conservatism of Czech (Art) historiography. The second section gathers contributions which analyze visual sources of Czech origin. The third part of the collection is reserved for texts that analyze gender issues on the level of literary representation. In the final part of the book, two case studies arising from an analysis of the pre-modern West European source base are presented. The volume cannot be regarded as exhaustive in any sense, however. It is a representative collection presenting current Czech research in pre-modern History and Art history that uses gender as a tool of analysis. It is innovative in the way it introduces this specific segment of Central European (Art) history addressing a broader audience and global academia.