Teaching the thousand-year period of medieval European literature and six-hundred years of Old Czech literature in Czech secondary education is often confronted by two interrelated challenges: the subjects are traditionally taught through a chronological approach to literary history in the first year of school, while presenting language, literary genres, themes, and ideas that are distant and difficult to understand for contemporary readers, particularly the target student group (15–16 years of age). A majority of teachers are unwilling to deal with old literature in their lessons. Can we find a way to modify and improve this practice? In this paper we try to grasp the perceived difficulty and otherness of this corpus in a constructive way and show that it can be productively used, for example, by moving away from the traditional chronological framework and focusing on probing texts (especially narratives) that link the present to the past. We show this possibility through the example of the story of Bruncvík, comparing its medieval version to a more recent version by Alois Jirásek in his Staré pověsti české (Legends of Old Bohemia).
Tis essay ofers a close reading of the Diary (c. 1465) of Squire Jaroslav, the Commentarius (c. 1467; Czech original lost, a Latin translation printed in 1577) by Václav Šašek of Bířkov, and the modern reworking of Šašek’s text in a children’s novel by Alois Jirásek (Až na konec světa, published in 1890). Te authors try to elucidate the characteristic features of these travelogues by examining the various kinds of fssures that can be found in each text. Troughout Jaroslav’s diary, for example, these rifs are indicated by “etc.”, which the reader is simply invited to fll in. Pavlovský introduces discontinuity into the story by inserting verbatim citations of various documents and charters that ultimately glorify Pavlovský’s benefactors, the family of the leader of Šašek’s legation, Lev of Rožmitál. Finally, Jirásek is presented as an exemplary post-medieval reader of antique texts who flls the ofered gaps with didactic content, anchoring his own agenda in the picturesque scafolding of a knightly quest to the edge of the world.
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