Search results for ""Author Frantisek Smahel""

The Czech king and Roman Emperor Charles IV met with the French king Charles V in Paris in 1378. Reconstructing the journey to this meeting with deft narrative talent, Frantisek Smahel traces the king's progress from Prague to Paris, piecing together a modern chronicle from contemporary French scholarship and medieval literature. The result is an appealing account of medieval life, everyday intellectualism, grand European politics of the time, and even medieval cuisine. Smahel sets the stage by presenting details of the life of Charles IV, including his early days in Paris and the political and international goals of his father, John of Bohemia. The author then presents a transcription of richly illustrated French chronicles of the historic meeting and offers an analysis of the importance of the conclave of the two most powerful European rulers of the time. Finally, Smahel considers, in individual studies, the practical organization of medieval festivities, including their logistics, transportation, culinary details, court manners, relationships, and symbols.With techniques borrowed from the fields of archaeology and microhistory as well as cultural anthropology and iconography, The Paris Summit, 1377-78 is a highly readable account of medieval lives and times that will appeal to historians as well as nonacademic audiences.

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The Kingdom of Bohemia at the end of the Middle Ages was a country in upheaval, for which the Hussite Revolution (1419-1436) stands in a defining way. In five thematic groups, the internationally known and renowned Czech mediavist Frantiek mahel sheds light on the manifold aspects that set central Europe in motion in the 25 essays from the past four decades, which have been brought together here and which have had a significant impact on research and which have been partially revised and updated in the annotation apparatus let. The topics range from the political position of the Bohemian countries to the changing power and social structures, the role of Tábor in Hussitism, the purgatorium sompniatum in the Hussite topography of the afterlife to the central role of the Four Prague Articles and questions of the visual Agitation during the study period.

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