The notions about the origins of nations in 14th and 15th century historical culture.

Vojtěch Bažant, The notions about the origins of nations in 14th and 15th century historical culture, Ph.D. thesis, Institute of Czech History, Faculty of Arts, Charles University, Prague 2020 The thesis offers an analysis of narrative structures in medieval historiography about Czech and Hungarian history, more specifically in historiography either created or read and rewritten in the 14th and the 15th century. The research is focused on a variety of narratives of the origins of nations, i.e. on stories retelling the Confusion of Tongues, the search for land and the building of a homeland, the establishment of a new society and, finally, the Christianisation of the tribe or people. Individual medieval historical works are treated as literary narratives, not as sources to be exploited for a reconstruction of historical events or of the context in which the chronicles in question were created. In this scope, the thesis examines individual narrative motifs as well as the entirety of the narrative; motifs are interpreted in their relation to the whole narrative while the chronicles and histories are approached as both meaningful stories and stylized narrations of these. The discourses on Czech and Hungarian histories are not construed in developmental terms; individual historical texts are rather..