A book presentation and lecture by Vaclav Zurek, PhD
Centre for Medieval Studies at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague
Wednesday, MAY 6, 2026 at 7 PM
To mark the 710th anniversary of the birth of Charles IV, King of Bohemia and Holy Roman Emperor, we invite you to a lecture devoted to one of the most remarkable rulers of the European Middle Ages.
Historian Václav Žurek will present the recently published English edition of his book Charles IV: A Portrait of a Medieval Ruler, exploring the life, reign and historical significance of a man who established Prague as a political, cultural, and intellectual center of the empire, including his patronage of monumental projects such as Charles University and the Charles Bridge.
Žurek will examine how the emperor’s idealized image was carefully crafted at his own court through rituals, writings, and symbolic acts. Situating Charles IV within the political and intellectual context of his time, he will explore the emperor’s exercise of power and its representation. The talk will also address the challenges of interpreting abundant yet highly partisan sources—and how these have shaped both Charles’s image in his own time and his enduring legacy as an “untouchable monument” of Czech history and national memory.
This event will be of interest to scholars, students, and all lovers of medieval history, political culture, and historiography.
Tickets: $5 (plus processing fee) are available through Eventbrite.
Seats are limited on a first-come, first-served basis.
Václav Žurek is a Czech medieval historian. He earned a double PhD in 2014 from Charles University in Prague and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, with a dissertation on the use of the past by the Luxembourg and Valois dynasties. Since 2008, he has been a research fellow at the Centre for Medieval Studies of the Czech Academy of Sciences. His work has focused on projects examining medieval rituals, especially coronations; the reception of medieval “bestsellers” in the Czech lands; and, most recently, political thought and verbal violence in late medieval Bohemia. He is the author of Charles IV: Portrait of a Medieval Ruler (Karolinum Publisher, 2018 Czech, 2025 English) and has published widely on medieval history. He is also actively engaged in popularizing scientific knowledge about the past.
The book is distributed by Chicago University Press and is available at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.