Prague Palimpsest: Myths of origins and textual authority in the medieval legend of Libuse

Departing from Patrick Geary's painterly image of foundational narratives of women as a pentimento under which traces of the original matriarchy is still visible, this essay uses the metaphor of the palimpsest to argue that the medieval Czech legend of Libuse is not a stable, immutable narrative but a constantly rewritten text in which the previous version is partially effaced and partially preserved. This image helps to explain the constant permutations in the foundational legend of Prague from its earliest shadowy attestation in Kristian's tenth-century account to the so-called Dalimil Chronicle of the early fourteenth century. Thomas argues that much of the foundational story of Prague with which we are currently familiar was in fact invented by Cosmas of Prague in his Chronica Boemorum (115), a seminal work which invites comparison with Geoffrey of Monmouth's highly influential epic of the British nation, Historia regum Britanniae (1135). Just as Cosmas furnished the Czechs with an early history presided over by Libuge and her female followers, so Geoffrey's Historia provided the Plantagenet rulers of England with their greatest hero - Arthur - and a pre -Saxon pedigree which they had previously lacked.