Seeking a Libretto

Driven by necessity, Smetana sought to establish himself in Prague through concerts, but his primary artistic goal was opera. Finding a suitable libretto, however, proved challenging, as Czech authors had little experience in the genre. With the help of Procházka, as Smetana notes in his diary, he eventually obtained an operatic text from Karel Sabina. The resulting work, The Brandenburgers in Bohemia (Braniboři v Čechách), is a three-act opera set in the late thirteenth century, when the Czech lands were occupied by Otto of Brandenburg. Eager to begin, Smetana completed the first act by late February 1862 and played it for Procházka, who praised the entire act. Sabina, the librettist, was one of the most intriguing Czech writers of the time. Although he initially studied philosophy and law, he later dedicated himself to writing and journalism. A pioneer of Czech literature, Sabina wrote realistic village novels and short stories about the Czech spiritual revival, promoting the ideals of fraternity, progress, and humanity.

Sabina's Libretto

The Brandenburgers in Bohemia dramatizes a romantic, yet improbable plot based on a historical episode from around 1280, with echoes of other key moments in Czech history, especially 1939. The narrative unfolds after the sudden death of Czech King Ottokar II (r. 1253–78). In the aftermath, Duke Otto of Brandenburg becomes regent and guardian to the young heir Wenceslaus II

One of the main intellectual changes that occurred in early modern Europe was the transition in ways of reading the Bible from the Calvinist and the Catholic hermeneutical approaches to the interpretation of the received text of the word of God, to the historical and philological reading of Scripture ‘as a work of culture’. According to Protestant hermeneutics, which dated to the authority of Luther and Calvin and which also underpinned the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England (1563), the following attributes distinguished Scripture from other literary works: auctoritas (‘in that its cause efficient is God, and many of the reasons adduced to support it, such as miracles, prophecies etc. were not deemed to be believed essentially through the experience of faith’); claritas (‘accessibility of God's message to all believers although duly mediated by education and catechetical practice – while those passages which are obscure to the readers, are so due to the interpreter's lack of understanding and/or faith, which can be enlightened and deciphered by using other clearer biblical texts’); perfectio and sufficientia (Scripture is perfect because it contains ‘all the necessary knowledge in the sense of a canon and a guiding principle that is necessary to know for the attainment of salvation’). As regards the Catholic context, instead, on 8 April 1546 the Council of Trent adopted a decree concerning the edition and the use of sacred texts, which was sometimes understood as prohibiting any emendation of the Vulgate ‘authentic’ version of the Scripture, ‘on account of its long-standing usage and approbation in the Catholic Church’.

Astute readers of Karla Taylor's Chaucer Reads ‘The Divine Comedy’ will recognize in my title a reference to a key concept in her elucidation of Chaucer's reading of Dante's Commedia: authentication, and its spectral double, the inauthentic. Authentication in her work refers to the literary devices a poet deploys to establish the credibility of both the narrator (primary) and the world he has constructed (secondary). That's no mean feat in Dante's Commedia, whose credibility is staked to its comprehensive synthesis of Christian theology. Since, as Taylor puts it, “death marks a radical break with the past,” Dante co-opts this stance of conversion as a mark of radical rupture, tied to the linguistic performance of the “eternal present” of the literary text, effectively inventing a formal system that insulates his text from the ravages of the world. The eternal present with which Dante's poem conspicuously ends is contrasted with the narrator's return – “gia volgeva il mi disio e ‘l velle” (“my desire and will had already rotated/revolved”) – by Dante's use of a verb in imperfect tense (volgeva) against the present tense of that famous last line: “l’amor che move il sole e l’altre stelle” (“the Love that moves the sun and other stars,” Par. XXXIII, 143–5). Language matters deeply to Dante's authentication of the reader's experience of the Commedia, because it aligns a theological vision with a core premise of the work: that the “converted” narrator, now “dead” to his previous self, can view not just his own life, but the lives of others, in the clear light of transcendent vision, authenticated by the beauty of poetry.

ABBOTS OF RUSHEN – 1408–1540

From the founding of Rushen Abbey in 1187, only fourteen are known by name. Five are recorded in the period 1408 to the dissolution.

Richard 1408–18

Henry Radcliffe 1495–97

John Faragher 1503–07

Thomas Radclyf 1531–32

Henry Jackson 1540

In a literal sense, Cantigas de amigo are songs sung by young women (amiga) about (de) their boyfriend (amigo). This medieval poetic tradition of maiden songs constitutes one of the main genres in the Indo-European oral tradition of women's songs. Transmitted by women – mothers and daughters across the centuries – the reminiscences of their voices have been registered since the earliest written manuscripts. During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, folklorists rediscovered these women's voices and songs as a living oral tradition of lyrical and lyrical-narrative work, dance, and worship songs and collected them.

However, these songs were typically ignored by historiographers of the national European literatures, who sometimes classified them as anonymous women’ songs, as in the case of the frauenlied (woman's song) and the winileod (song of the wini, friend, or beloved) in German historiography, for example. Eventually, they would ascribe these songs to male poets, who then became the authors of the songs. Only in some rare instances were these songs featured in histories of literature (for example, in the case of the first chapter of the Portuguese Literature History). However, save for a few exceptions, the genre was virtually ignored in the histories of Spanish, German, French, and English literatures, which focused instead on the great national epic when discussing medieval poetry.