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Jacob—possibly the first Prague Jew in Bohemian literature mentioned by name—who dared to act in the name of the duke in some financial matter (obviously, his transactions were a failure). Cosmas mobilizes much of the repertory of contemporary anti-Semitism against Jacob: his hand makes dirty whatever he touches, his breath kills by poison, Satan is seen to be his steady companion (“many trustworthy say”), he destroys a Christian altar and throws the holy relics in his cesspool ( cloaca ); yet the Jewish community can ransom his life for three thousand measures of silver and one hundred measures of gold (the duke knows whom he can squeeze); and erudite Cosmas, always ready to serve his ruler, throws in an artful hexameter about Mary Magdalene, on whose day, in the year of the Lord 1124, the entire affair happened. On other occasions, he shows independent and poetic gifts, when writing, for example, about an advancing army in full armor as if made “of translucent ice,” or elders at a meeting “confused like fish in turbid waters.”
    Cosmas is the first who gives the woman who speaks of the glory of Prague the name Lubossa, but he characterizes her ambivalently, as if she were perhaps not entirely explicable by a Christian view of pagan times alone. Her sisters Kazi and Thethka are almost theological allegories of evil: Kazi, compared to Medea, is accused of being a venefica , of preparing
and administering poisons; and Thethka is simply a witch ( malefica ) eager to return people to the blasphemous rituals of yore. Lubossa is unique; in a narrative designed to legitimize the power of the Pemyslid dynasty, Cosmas cannot but celebrate the future mother of his dukes and the king, yet she remains, in his eyes, a rather disturbing character. He begins his portrait with a catalogue of extraordinary praise: “among women she was especially admirable, circumspect in advice, vigorous in her speech, of chaste body, honest conduct, second to none in resolving the legal affairs of the people, affable with everybody and worthy of love, the adornment and glory of womanhood who took care, with discernment, of the business of men” (I,4). Unfortunately, in the human realm nobody is perfect, Cosmas adds, and Lubossa was, after all, a soothsayer (phitonissa); he remarks elsewhere that she and her sisters, through magic art, “played” with the people.
    It is during the judgment scene that Lubossa, by her relaxed ways, reveals something of the problems of her character, and the chronicler, or rather the teller of ribald tales, uses words that will be censured by his more spiritual translators and disappear totally from later patriotic legends. In Cosmas’s version, Lubossa does not sit on the throne surrounded by the elders (as in later schoolbooks), but receives the plaintiffs in bed. “Resting on her elbow like one who is giving birth, she lay there on a high pile of soft and embroidered pillows, as is the lasciviously wanton habit of women ( lasciva mollicies mulierum ) when they do not have a man at home whom they fear” (I,4). It is an image of impropriety, déshabillé , spread legs and sensuous disorder, and the male plaintiffs are not sparing in their insults. Women, they say, have little understanding sitting on a throne, and even less when they are lying in bed, where they should be ready to receive their husbands rather than to resolve a legal case. In matters of men Lubossa cannot speak but deceptively, being a woman of a “fissured” body ( rimosa ).
    Lubossa has a difficult time, as is not surprising, when she subsequently warns her people of the dangers of a male ruler; although she proclaims that under male law the new division of labor will change people into those who pay and those who collect taxes, into executioners, cooks, bakers, workers in vineyards and on the fields, furriers and cobblers (to name but a few), they want their duke, whom Lubossa, submitting, provides. Her prophecy of the glories of