The Fragile Signs of Historical Matter: On the Poetics of Old-Czech Narrative ‘Entertainingly Edifying’ Prose

This study explores the poetics of Old Czech narrative prose, focusing on how medieval vernacular texts navigate the instability between sign and meaning. Drawing on works such as Alexander, Apollonius of Tyre, and Griselda, it argues that these prose narratives were composed in a way that exposes the limits of representation, often functioning not as definitive moral exempla but as provocations inviting ethical and emotional reflection. Rather than merely translating content from Biblical or other (para)historiographical sources, these texts bring to the fore processes of adaptation and recontextualization that highlight their historically situated human origins. They emphasize literary performativity and narrative self-awareness, revealing their own fragility and partiality as textual constructs. Through their layered structure and ambivalent exemplarity, they resist straightforward allegorical readings, offering instead multidirectional engagements with textuality, narrativity, historical imagination, emotion, and identity. The author proceeds to make inferences about the ethical effect of medieval narrative prose in its efforts to evoke restraint and self-discipline in its readers, as well as playing to their inner complexity.