Like the Valois kings of France, the late medieval Přemyslid and Luxembourg rulers of Bohemia consciously appropriated sacred language and imagery in order to enhance their prestige as kings and as emperors. This chapter will argue that Richard II cultivated a similar model of sacral kingship that has no immediate precedent in his own (Plantagenet) family and that can be partly attributed to his Bohemian wife’s cultural and political mediation at the English court. An important component of Richard’s sacral model of kingship was his apparent identification with Christ as reflected in the art he commissioned and the court propaganda he sponsored. As we shall see, the famous Westminster full-length portrait displays pronounced Christ-like features as scholars have already noted. We shall also find other iconographic evidence of Richard’s self-stylization as alter Christus. In presenting himself as the heavenly bridegroom Richard was not only enhancing the sacral nature of his kingship, he was also identifying politically with the Luxembourg imperial family of Anne of Bohemia. In his desire to succeed her father as Holy Roman Emperor in the 1390s, Richard increasingly used Christological motifs to present himself as Emperor Charles’s true successor. Insofar as Charles IV cultivated his own image as alter Christus, we can plausibly claim that Richard was identifying both with Christ and with Charles. In this way, Richard conflated the religious and political dimensions in his kingship, a strategy that cannot be reduced, as some scholars have claimed, to simple psychological narcissism. As we shall see, piety and politics were deeply interrelated ideological features of kingly power and prestige at both the Luxembourg and Ricardian courts.

Agnes of Prague and Kunigunde, Abbess of the St George Convent in Prague

Barbara Newman’s theory of the “crossover” between the secular and the sacred provides a valuable hermeneutical tool for understanding the evolution of these courtly discourses in late medieval European culture. According to Newman, premodern readers understood “sacred” and “secular” not as opposing points on a continuum but as what she terms a state of “double judgment” whereby transcendental truths could be understood through paradox or inversion. This process began in the twelfth century and is exemplified by Chrétien de Troyes’ Arthurian romance Lancelot (Le Chevalier de la Charrette) and Clemence of Barking’s Anglo-Norman Life of St Catherine.