Continuing his two-decades-long exploration of medieval and early modern Anglo-Bohemian relations, Thomas, in his latest study, convincingly demonstrates the significant cultural and political ramifications of King Richard II's marriage to Anne of Bohemia in 1382. The daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV and closely related to the French Valois dynasty, Anne embodied what Thomas calls a cosmopolitan, multilingual “international court culture” (7) that was foreign to the more insular and provincial Plantagenet monarchs. Thomas convincingly demonstrates how Richard's marriage deepened his irenic approach to the Continent and enhanced his ambitions to succeed Charles as Holy Roman Emperor. Anne's Franco-Bohemian cultural inheritance, Thomas shows, profoundly shaped the poets and visual artists of 1380s and 1390s England, particularly Geoffrey Chaucer and the anonymous composer of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl.

Henry Bolingbroke's ascent to the throne in 1399 and the subsequent Lancastrian effort to erase the memory of Richard's reign makes immeasurably more difficult Thomas's reconstruction of the “brilliant shards” of the Ricardian “shattered international mirror” (38). Lacking evidence that Richard or Anne ever financed Chaucer's poetry, Thomas's first two chapters detail the complex patronage networks of Anne's family to argue that “Chaucer may have imagined Anne receiving his work and being receptive to it,” precisely “because there was no tradition of rewarding vernacular English poets” (10). Chaucer's poetry may imitate the courtly love visions of Continental poets to forge connections with the sort of international court poets patronized by the queen's extended family: Anne's uncle Wenceslas, Duke of Luxembourg and Brabant, was Jean Froissart's patron, while Guillaume de Machaut served King John of Bohemia and his daughter, Bonne of Luxembourg, Anne's aunt. Thomas suggests that the multilingualism of Charles IV's court in Prague offers a precedent for the rise of English in the Ricardian court, and he raises provocative questions about whether Chaucer's apparent feminism might be motivated more by his “desire to be part of a sophisticated international club of writers” (191) than his own beliefs, especially when his feminist sensibilities falter in poems like the Legend of Good Women.

Throughout his study, Thomas interprets a range of poems—including Confessio Amantis and the Alliterative Morte Arthure—as political allegory, finding references to Anne in such characters as Chaucer's Griselda and Constance, the former seemingly “norissed in an emperoures halle,” the latter the literal daughter of a Roman “Emperour.” This interpretive strategy continues when Thomas turns to the poet who wrote Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl in the book's third and fourth chapters. He again creatively reworks a lack of evidence to argue that the poet's anonymity can be “explained by the Lancastrian desire to suppress the memory of the international court culture” (191), as Gawain and Pearl both appear more deeply integrated into the Ricardian court and international court culture than any of Chaucer's poems. Gawain, Thomas shows, navigates between “admiration for the Ricardian court culture and moral scruples about its hubristic drawbacks” (90), while Pearl elegizes the queen after her death in 1394, fusing love poetry with religious allegory in ways that recall Bohemian virgin-martyr stories and Richard's preoccupation with his own visual representations.

Most exciting to scholars of medieval and early modern England will be Thomas's vast knowledge about the politics, literature, and visual arts of Anne's Franco-Bohemian cultural milieu. He skillfully situates Pearl within international court culture—for instance, with convincing readings of hagiography in verbal and visual art, including the Czech Legend of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (ca. 1360–75), the illuminated Passional of Abbess Kunigunde (ca. 1312–21), and the Wilton Diptych altarpiece. Thomas's book, printed on glossy stock with over three dozen colorful and sharp reproductions of manuscripts and other artwork, reveals continuities between literary and visual artifacts and foregrounds connections across modern nation-states. Some may wish Thomas had extended his close analysis of poetry and paintings to flesh out the implications of his political, feminist, and at times psychological readings. Even so, Thomas's learned study will leave its readers with a newfound appreciation for the Bohemian influences that gave the Ricardian court a level of aesthetic sophistication not to be approached in England until the reign of Henry VIII more than a century later.