The house of Luxembourg between 1308 and 1437 is best known today for its principal royal and imperial representatives, Henry VII, John the Blind, Charles IV, and Charles’s two sons, Wenceslas and Sigismund – a group of rulers who, for better or worse, shaped the political destiny of much of Europe during the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. While some of the Luxembourg cultural legacy can still be experienced directly today in and around Prague and southern Germany, and through the literary and musical works of Machaut, Froissart, and Wolkenstein, it reached much further across Europe : from England to present-day Romania, and from the Baltic Sea to the Italian peninsula, alongside the dynasty’s homelands in what is now Luxembourg, Belgium and France. However, this culture has not always attracted the scholarly attention it deserves.

This volume explores the pan-European impact and influence of the Luxembourgs in a variety of fields : art and architectural history, material culture, Czech, French, German and Latin text production, gender and intellectual history, and music. Embracing the subject matter from multi-disciplinary and transnational perspectives, the essays here offer new insights into the late medieval cultures of the Luxembourg court. Particular subjects treated include the making of the « Wenceslas Bible » ; Machaut at the court of John of Luxembourg ; and Charles IV’s patronage of multilingual literature.

On publication this book is available as an Open Access eBook under the Creative Commons license : CC BY-NC-ND.

Table des matières :
Introduction : The ‘Long Luxembourg Century’ (1308-1437) : Courtly Networks, Cultural Politics, Dynastic Legacy
Karl Kügle, Ingrid Ciulisová, Václav Žůrek

PART I : John the Blind and his Progeny in France
1. The ‘Luxembourgness’ of Things : Machaut C, Glazier 52, and Dynastic Presence in Early Fourteenth-century France – Uri Smilansky
2. Guillaume de Machaut at the court of John of Luxembourg : Defining a Social Milieu – Jana Fantysová Matějková
3. The Vyšší Brod Cycle and its Anonymous Painter : French and Bohemian Court Circles in the 1340s – Lenka Panušková

PART II : Marvelous Objects and Culture at the Court of Charles IV
4. Charles of Luxembourg and his Reliquary Cross : the Significance of Precious Stones – Ingrid Ciulisová
5. Charles IV and the Patronage of Multilingual Literature at his Court and Beyond – Václav Žůrek
6. Miraculous Objects and Foundational Sins : Verbal and Material Reality in the Dalimil Chronicle, the Chronicle of Přibík Pulkava of Radenín, and Charles IV’s Autobiography – Matouš Jaluška

PART III : Wenceslas and Sigismund : Art, Politics, and Diplomacy
7. The Making of the Wenceslas Bible, with Special Consideration of the Theological Concept of its Genesis Initial – Maria Theisen
8. The Naked King : Representing Wenceslas in his Illuminated Bible – Gia Toussaint
9. Dealing with the Luxembourg Court : Ellwangen Abbey and their Imperial Overlord – Mark Whelan
10. Assessing the Luxembourgs : The Image of Wenceslas and Sigismund in the Correspondence of Italian Ambassadors – Ondřej Schmidt

PART IV : Studying the Luxembourgs : What has been Neglected
11. Heiresses, Regents, and Patrons : Female Rulers in the Age of the Luxembourgs – Julia Burkhardt
12. Image-making, image-breaking, and the Luxembourg Monarchy – Len Scales
13. The Absent Present : Luxembourg Courts, their Cultures, and Music Histor(iograph)y – Karl Kügle

Select Bibliography
Index

Auteurs
KARL KÜGLE is Director of Research in the Faculty of Music, University of Oxford, and a Senior Research Fellow of Wadham College.

INGRID CIULISOVÁ is a Senior Research Fellow in Art History at the Art Research Centre of the Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and an Associated Professor of the Charles University in Prague.

VÁCLAV ŽŮREK is a research fellow at the Centre for Medieval Studies Prague, which is part of the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences.