Vojtěch Bažant
I gained my M.A. in history at Charles University in Prague and currently I am PhD student at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. I also collaborate with the Centre for Medieval Studies in Prague. My PhD thesis, “The Notions about the Beginning of Nations in 14th and 15th Century Historical Culture,” is devoted to the analysis of narrative structures and socio-cultural functions of late medieval historiography, primarily in the Land of the Bohemian Crown and the Kingdom of Hungary.
In my DEMM project, I prepared a digital edition of Cronica Bohemorum, an abbreviated history of the Czech Lands. An anonymous author rewrote primarily the chronicle by Příbík Pulkava of Radenín into a short annalistic list of events constituting the narrative of the “Czech history”. In modern historiography, Cronica Bohemorum is considered to be a text establishing a large corpus of the Old Czech Annals. In spite of the fact that this text was studied by generations of Czech historians, a critical edition is not available. A single witness was published by Dobner in 1774, other are left in manuscripts; there are ten witnesses extant. Stemma proposed by Šimák in 1918 was based only on six known witnesses and it was questioned for lack of clarity. For these reasons I offer parallel versions of witnesses as a first step on the way to a new stemma. Since some of witnesses are hardly available, at the moment I work with six of them while planning to add the rest of them in the following part of my project.