The article presents a report from an interpretative seminar focused on the story of Tristan and Iseult in its various forms, medieval and modern. The authors (a historian and a literary scholar) strove to maintain consistent interdisciplinary approach during the course, not only with respect to the methods of inquiry, but also in teaching. It is shown here that such undertaking is feasible and that the interdisciplinary dialogue between two living persons has a potential to attract and engage even students with no previous experience with medieval textual material. In addition, the course has revealed two broad chains of questions that can stimulate further interdisciplinary exploration — the questions about the process of signification and the questions about matters (especially liquids) and their transmutations.
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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