Das Braunschweiger Zeugnis über die böhmische Geschichtsschreibung des 13. Jahrhunderts
| Title in English | The Brunswick testimony on Bohemian historiography of the 13th century |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Peer-reviewed scientific article |
| Magazine / Source | DEUTSCHES ARCHIV FÜR ERFORSCHUNG DES MITTELALTERS |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| web | https://www.harrassowitz-verlag.de/Deutsches_Archiv_f%C3%BCr_Erforschung_des_Mittelalters_81_%282025%291/title_8538.ahtml |
| Keywords | Braunschweig (Brunswick); Bohemia; narrative sources; the Second Continuation of Cosmas; Cosmas of Prague; 13th century 14th century |
| Description | This study deals with the collection of chronicles entitled Cronica Boemorum auct. canonico S. Blasii Brunsvicensis (MGH SS 30,1, S. 37–43), which originated between 1292 and 1296, and which has survived in only a single copy from around 1300 (Trier, Stadtbibliothek, Ms. 1999/129). This article focuses on the relationship of this work to narrative sources of Czech provenance of the 13th and 14th centuries, especially to the chronicles of Přibík Pulkava and John Neplach and to the first part of the so-called Chronicle of the Minorite Beneš and to the Excerpta de diversis chronicis additis quibusdam Aulae Regiae memorabilibus. The compiler of this work, a canon of the chapter of St Blase in Braunschweig, used between the years 1292 and 1296 the chronicle of Cosmas and his two continuations, whose narration he significantly reduced. Some information and details of the Braunschweig excerpt from the end of the 13th century are missing in all manuscripts of the surviving version of the Second Continuation of Cosmas, but we come across them in the chronicles of the time of emperor Charles IV in the 14th century. This study analyses the relationships between all these sources and comes to the following conclusions (see also the filiation in the appendix). The author of the Braunschweig excerpt Cronica Boemorum and the aforementioned Czech chroniclers of the 14th century used a common source for the description of the years 1140–1278 – an extended (lost) version of the Second Continuation of Cosmas. In this new context, the surviving version of the Second Continuation of Cosmas, which in its oldest form known to us appears in the Dražice codex, completed shortly before 1342, is an abridged version of this lost source. The supposedly more detailed, now lost version of the Second Continuation, which originally only extended to the year 1278, was in all probability completed between 1283 and 1285 and still existed between the 1350s and 1370s, when it could still have been used by chroniclers from the time of Charles IV. |
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