The cult of the Joys of the Virgin Mary was a popular form of late medieval devotion, as attested both by Latin and vernacular culture. In the Kingdom of Bohemia, three narrative poems were composed on the subject during the second half of the fourteenth century alongside prayers and meditations on the Joys. Each of the three compositions presents a peculiar way to communicate the essential points of Catholic doctrine regarding Mary (perpetual virginity, painless childbirth, co-redemptive role), but also offer various methods to induce the public to devotional participation. A version copied in the Manuscript of Hradec Králové builds upon authoritative speech produced mainly by the narrator, the efficacy of which is represented and argued for within the plot and through his own commentaries. This rendition also puts forward the correlation between expressive body language and the emotional conditions of the protagonists, which call for imitation by the public (in the Joy of the Visitation in particular). A different version from the Manuscript of St. Vitus Metropolitan Chapter Library in Prague emphasizes, on the other hand, the ability to listen to saintly words. The religious message is voiced here by the characters themselves rather than by the narrator; Mary’s long lyric speech to resurrected Jesus and Christ’s address to Mary upon her death create a space where the readers or listeners are invited to empathize with them and ultimately contemplate their role in salvation. This poem thus calls for a more meditative way of reception. The last composition represents a combination of prayers to Mary with a narrative of her death and Assumption based on an apocryphal story in Latin. Personal devotional gesture is combined here with an edifying goal directed to the larger audience.
Animals have a peculiar place in the works of Adalbert Stifter, a 19th century Czech and Austrian writer. He describes them in his prose, but also in an unpublished essay ‘Zur Psichologie der Thiere’, where he bases his concept of the animal on both likeness and difference. In Stifter’s short story Der Kondor, the animal gaze represents this duality, allowing an imagined conversation. As a result, the cat in the story becomes a subject, anticipating the philosophy of Martin Buber and Jacques Derrida that explored the language of the animal’s gaze.
In this study I reflect on how poetry can be used to develop skills and knowledge related to the teaching of language and literature (e.g. phonetic, etymological and syntactic analysis, creative writing, vocabulary expansion, reading competence) as well as skills that go beyond this, such as creative collaboration, public speaking, confronting other points of view, recognizing linguistic manipulation and content emptiness, working with one’s own voice, and exploring other art forms. I present basic pedagogical principles that can make lessons more effective, encourage students to engage with the material, and show them the value of their achievements. Most of these principles can also be applied to prose writing, second language acquisition, and creative writing lessons. Most of this paper is devoted to introducing specific learning activities. The first part discusses activities involving the poem as a whole, its atmosphere, and its historical and political context, as well as its vocabulary and images. The second part focuses on activities in which we work with fragments, breaking up the poem, tearing it apart, and examining it thoroughly to get closer to it. At the end of the practical part, I briefly discuss the principles of students’ creative work so that this activity does not discourage them from their own experiments and make them think that they ‘can’t hear rhythm’ or ‘can’t write poems’. Instead, well-chosen activities should build students’ linguistic and creative confidence, and strengthen their positive relationship with poetry. My guiding principle is that we can only get to better know, understand, and enjoy poetry if we stop treating it like a precious piece of porcelain that we are afraid to approach, let alone pick up and use. However, I also believe that meaningful work with poetry requires not only courage and good pedagogical practices, but also a teacher’s solid theoretical knowledge of phonetics, poetics, metrics, and the history of verse forms.
This study explores the poetics of Old Czech narrative prose, focusing on how medieval vernacular texts navigate the instability between sign and meaning. Drawing on works such as Alexander, Apollonius of Tyre, and Griselda, it argues that these prose narratives were composed in a way that exposes the limits of representation, often functioning not as definitive moral exempla but as provocations inviting ethical and emotional reflection. Rather than merely translating content from Biblical or other (para)historiographical sources, these texts bring to the fore processes of adaptation and recontextualization that highlight their historically situated human origins. They emphasize literary performativity and narrative self-awareness, revealing their own fragility and partiality as textual constructs. Through their layered structure and ambivalent exemplarity, they resist straightforward allegorical readings, offering instead multidirectional engagements with textuality, narrativity, historical imagination, emotion, and identity. The author proceeds to make inferences about the ethical effect of medieval narrative prose in its efforts to evoke restraint and self-discipline in its readers, as well as playing to their inner complexity.
To mark the centenary of Karel Hynek Mácha’s death, the Prague Linguistic Circle compiled the volume Torso a tajemství Máchova díla (Torso and the Mystery of Mácha’s Work). This article provides a detailed analysis of Dmytro Čyževs’kyj’s contribution, ‘K Máchovu světovému názoru’ (‘On Má cha’s worldview’), focusing on its methodological aspects. Contrary to what the title suggests, this is not necessarily a classic hermeneutic endeavour. For Čyževs’kyj seeks to determine what he defines as a ‘worldview’ based on the way in which Mácha’s work is shaped by its language. From the perspective of the history of entanglement, there are certainly points of contact with the discussions held at the time about a structuralist approach within the Prague Linguistic Circle, particularly Jan Mukařovský’s concept of the ‘semantic gesture’, which was also developed in the same anthology on Mácha’s work. In both cases — Čyževs’kyj’s attempt to determine Mácha’s ‘world view’ from the poetic language of his works and Mukařovský’s search for the ‘semantic gesture’ conveyed in the way the parts of the work are connected — the aim, as a parallel reading shows, is to determine a way of referring to the world from the manifest verbal form of Mácha’s work.
