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detail; for three nights, the newlyweds strive for happiness and the duke fears that a magic object has been hidden in the bed that makes it impossible for him to perform as the occasion warrants. The enraged Mathilda puts a stool on a table, takes off her nightgown, climbs up, shows herself all naked to the young man, and, as the learned dean says, “wiggled her ass like a goose who wanted to build a nest” (II,32), telling the duke to search her thoroughly for any hidden magic object. (The young man flees the scene.) The marriage was dissolved, historians tell us, only four years later.
    In his radical reinterpretation of Cosmas as a writer preserving the poems and narratives of artists, restlessly traveling all over Europe from court to court in search of noble patrons, Karbusický delivers a blow to sentimental traditionalists, including those of the Stalinist nomenklatura, but he also suggests the productive idea that it is much more important to know what happens to Libussa (to use her traditional English name) in the rich historiographic and artistic material that came after Cosmas than to ask whether there was ever a real person of her name. Her life in history and the arts, to which different nations in different circumstances contributed, should be more important than the shadow of the phitonissa, if there ever was one. Yet intellectual tradition is highly selective, as Karbusický’s more conservative colleague František Graus has shown; it forgets, and remembers, whatever it needs. After Cosmas, Libussa asserted her fundamental place as mother of the Pemyslids in the castle of Prague and, as the dynasty died out, assumed a more independent position. The line between the myth and the historical events was increasingly blurred. She was lifted from myth into history; the fourteenth-century Italian Franciscan Giovanni dei Marignolli, who was called to Prague in 1355 (after fourteen years in the Far East) by the Emperor Charles IV to write a world
history for him, actually related her to Eliška, of the Pemyslids, that is, to the emperor’s mother; in other chronicles, e.g., that of the so-called Dalimil, who wrote earlier in the fourteenth century (c. 1315), she became clearly a woman of the times, keeping her head high at the council of Czech nobility (because Dalimil wanted to stress the importance of Czech barons) and speaking up against the foreigners, Germans, who were flooding the land.
    The Renaissance and the Baroque age revived interest in wondrous women of magic powers. The Czech Catholic chronicler Hájek of Liboany, an imaginative sixteenth-century master of poetic inventions, in his own way completed Libussa’s historicization by defining abstruse chronologies, and he also followed Dalimil’s narrative in offering melodramatic and gory detail about the “Maidens’ War,” fighting body to body, blood and treachery, eros and thanatos (Cosmos had written about the ancient love game [ ludus ] of Whitsuntide, using the metaphors of war for wooing and submitting). Hájek is responsible for bringing Libussa closer to Czech and German readers of his age (his book was published in 1541) and of successive centuries. His popular book was adorned with expressive woodcuts, and its translation into German, for the first time as early as 1596, gave Libussa an important place in the Central European imagination. In Dresden, a German play about her was staged in 1666, and Italian opera in Prague, performing mostly for aristocratic audiences, provided La Libussa (1703). Czech rationalists, however, were definitely not enchanted by her or her forebears, and they tried to explain away her myth by the discourse of reason; while Gelasius Dobner, a scholarly Prague abbé, succeeded in totally discrediting Ur-father Czech, he could not prevent Libussa, surviving the myth and the dynasty, from attracting more attention to herself. She was loved by Czech and German romantics; the Czechs were eager for greatness to compete