During our travels across Australia and New Zealand, we suffered an acute overdose of omnipresent, gorgeously illuminated French and Flemish books of hours. Pretty pictures are nice, but after several weeks far from home, we grew genuinely homesick for our “ugly” Bohemian manuscripts. Hunting down a medieval trace of our homeland thus became our unexpected and slightly obsessive crusade across the libraries of Aotearoa.
The quest kicked off at the University of Otago Library in Dunedin, where we got our hands on their catalogue of medieval manuscripts. Lucie immediately focused on items of “German” provenance. Czech nationalists might hate to hear it, but the Czech lands were so intertwined with the German cultural space that cataloguers often have no idea whether a manuscript actually came from modern-day Germany, Austria, or Czechia.
Soon enough, Lucie spotted the prime suspect: a manuscript catalogued as German that contained Malogranatum, a famous spiritual work written in the mid-14th century by a Cistercian monk at Zbraslav Abbey. It was a Central European bestseller back in that time, but its roots are undeniably Bohemian. The librarians, being lovely, tried hard to show us far prettier and more valuable treasures, but we made it clear – we weren’t leaving without seeing that suspicious manuscript.
The moment Lucie opened the volume, marginal notes danced before her eyes. “We have to find at least one gloss written in Old Czech,” she declared. The gauntlet was thrown. Jakub promptly jumped in, joining her tireless frenzy of leafing through pages and deciphering tiny medieval scrawls.
Then, out of nowhere, lightning struck: “Wait… isn’t that Czech?”
It was. The word neobyceyno[st] (neobyčejnost) was glowing next to the Latin insolencia like a pint of Pilsner among all the Anglo-Saxon pale ales and IPAs. Our inner doubting Thomases still hesitated to believe we were witnessing codicological history. Could this truly be the southernmost Old Czech gloss on planet Earth? Or were we just hallucinating from manuscript dust and wishful thinking?
None of that. On the upper margin of the very next folio, zpupno[st] stood out above the Latin contumacia, leaving zero room for doubt. There we were, touching authentic Czech medieval heritage on the literal opposite side of the globe, where albatrosses, sea lions, and penguins meet. What a coincidence! Right around the time when giant moa birds were fighting their doomed, final battle for survival in the New Zealand wilderness, an unknown Czech scribe on the other side of the planet was translating the Latin words for “insolence” and “stubbornness.” Centuries later, the bones of the extinct moa and this copy of Malogranatum – now officially our favourite book on the entire South Island – share a common fate, resting quietly side-by-side in the university collections in Dunedin.
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