Within the glittering Hapsburg court in Prague lurks a darkness that no one dares mention... In 1606, the city of Prague shines as a golden mecca of art and culture carefully cultivated by Emperor Rudolf II. But the emperor hides an ugly secret: His bastard son, Don Julius, is afflicted with a madness that pushes the young prince to unspeakable depravity. Desperate to stem his son's growing number of scandals, the emperor exiles Don Julius to a remote corner of Bohemia, where the young man is placed in the care of a bloodletter named Pichler. The bloodletter's task: cure Don Julius of his madness by purging the vicious humors coursing through his veins. When Pichler brings his daughter Marketa to assist him, she becomes the object of Don Julius's frenzied--and dangerous--obsession. To him, she embodies the women pictured in the Coded Book of Wonder, a priceless manuscript from the imperial library that was his only link to sanity. As the prince descends further into the darkness of his mind, his acts become ever more desperate, as Marketa, both frightened and fascinated, can't stay away. Inspired by a real-life murder that threatened to topple the powerful Hapsburg dynasty, The Bloodletter's Daughter is a dark and richly detailed saga of passion and revenge.

Written in the early 1890s, before Czech independence and in an age of patriotic upsurge and romanticism, these thirty-four tales quite naturally reflect a glorification of the Czech past. While the details of the legends are necessarily archaic, peopled by kings and noblemen, ghosts and magic, the themes are universal. Now at the dawn of a new era of Czech independence, they provide a fascinating new perspective to the contemporary situation.

They ate garlic and didn't always bathe; they listened to Wagner and worshiped Diaghilev; they sent their children to coeducational schools, explored homosexuality and free love, vegetarianism and Post-impressionism. They were often drunk and broke, sometimes hungry, but they were of a rebellious spirit. Inhabiting the same England with Philistines and Puritans, this parallel minority of moral pioneers lived in a world of faulty fireplaces, bounced checks, blocked drains, whooping cough, and incontinent cats. They were the bohemians. Virginia Nicholson -- the granddaughter of painter Vanessa Bell and the great-niece of Virginia Woolf -- explores the subversive, eccentric, and flamboyant artistic community of the early twentieth century in this "wonderfully researched and colorful composite portrait of an enigmatic world whose members, because they lived by no rules, are difficult to characterize" (San Francisco Chronicle).

The day her fiancé died suddenly of a heart attack, Katie Swenson retreated to "Bohemia," the third-floor loft that the couple had renovated in their home in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and began to write. A visceral account of grief and the profound kindness that resonates around it, this is also the story of her hundred-year-old house, named the "Scarab" after the Egyptian symbol for rebirth, and the two courageous women who built it a century earlier--Wellesley College professors Katharine Coman and her partner Katharine Lee Bates, author of "America the Beautiful." Parallel lives unfold in the magical third-floor loft, where Coman died, where Bates mourned, and where Swenson wrote and wrote through that first searing year, held up by their spirits. Told with rare emotional power, In Bohemia is a meditation on love, family, and community and inspires us to be our best selves.

67 texts, including hymns, manifestos, articles or extracts from lengthy studies exemplify the relation between Romanticism and the national movements in the cultural space ranging from Poland to the Ottoman Empire. Each text is accompanied by a presentation of the author, and by an analysis of the context in which the respective work was born.The end of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution had shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms of the old corporate society. In culture a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism and provided a new key for a growing number of activists to 're-imagine' their national community, reaching beyond the traditional frameworks of identification (such as the 'political nation', regional patriotism, or Christian universalism). The collection focuses on the interplay of Romantic cultural discourses and the shaping of national ideology throughout the 19th century, tracing the patterns of cultural transfer with Western Europe as well as the mimetic competition of national ideologies within the region.

Berkeley Bohemia highlights the contributions of the eccentric residents of one of America's centers of cultural innovation, during a critical period in the development of the country's radical thought. These writers and artists included Ansel Adams, Jack London, Dorothea Lange, John Muir, Bernard Maybeck, Joaquin Miller, Ina Coolbrith, and Charles and Lousie Keeler and other colorful characters less well known today.Due to its vibrant setting as a crossroads of cultures, Berkeley continues as a fertile ground for individuality, eccentricity, and creative expression. The Berkeley legacy of scholars and visionaries has inspired three generations of men and women, who still make Berkeley a place where ordinary people can flourish creatively, and the extraordinary is welcomed.

A cultural history of the Czech people, examining the significance of the small central European nation's artistic, literary, and political developments from its origins through approximately 1960.

An erotic, comedic, and compulsively readable historical novel depicting the beguiling Giacomo Casanova as he looks back on a life of love and ribald adventure In Count Waldstein’s far-flung Bohemian castle, an aging Casanova spends his days as a librarian cataloging the count’s extensive collection of books. Or at least that’s what he’s supposed to be doing. Ever the storyteller, Casanova instead dedicates himself to his own writing, for which the young servant Laura Brock serves as an endlessly fascinated audience. He recounts to her his greatest escapades—from romances in a Venetian convent to the seduction of an entire harem to the triumphant amassing (and subsequent loss) of a fortune in Paris. Enlivened by the French Revolution and the liberating ideas of the Enlightenment, Casanova’s latest exploits prove he still possesses an intellectual vigor and insatiable curiosity. Even old age can’t keep this legendary libertine—who corresponded with Voltaire, discussed flight with Benjamin Franklin, and whose life and writings inspired artists as diverse as Mozart, Flaubert, Stendhal, and Hesse—from causing trouble. Rich with eighteenth-century European social, political, and religious history, Casanova in Bohemia is an energetic and erotic portrait of Western literature’s most beloved lothario, whose hedonism was matched by his creativity and wit.

In the years following World War I, the New Orleans French Quarter attracted artists and writers with its low rents, faded charm, and colorful street life. By the 1920s Jackson Square had become the center of a vibrant if short-lived bohemia. A young William Faulkner and his roommate William Spratling, an artist who taught at Tulane University, resided among the "artful and crafty ones of the French Quarter." In Dixie Bohemia John Shelton Reed introduces Faulkner's circle of friends -- ranging from the distinguished Sherwood Anderson to a gender-bending Mardi Gras costume designer -- and brings to life the people and places of New Orleans in the Jazz Age. Reed begins with Faulkner and Spratling's self-published homage to their fellow bohemians, "Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles." The book contained 43 sketches of New Orleans artists, by Spratling, with captions and a short introduction by Faulkner. The title served as a rather obscure joke: Sherwood was not a Creole and neither were most of the people featured. But with Reed's commentary, these profiles serve as an entry into the world of artists and writers that dined on Decatur Street, attended masked balls, and blatantly ignored the Prohibition Act. These men and women also helped to establish New Orleans institutions such as the Double Dealer literary magazine, the Arts and Crafts Club, and Le Petit Theatre. But unlike most bohemias, the one in New Orleans existed as a whites-only affair. Though some of the bohemians were relatively progressive, and many employed African American material in their own work, few of them knew or cared about what was going on across town among the city's black intellectuals and artists. The positive developments from this French Quarter renaissance, however, attracted attention and visitors, inspiring the historic preservation and commercial revitalization that turned the area into a tourist destination. Predictably, this gentrification drove out many of the working artists and writers who had helped revive the area. As Reed points out, one resident who identified herself as an "artist" on the 1920 federal census gave her occupation in 1930 as "saleslady, real estate," reflecting the decline of an active artistic class. A charming and insightful glimpse into an era, Dixie Bohemia describes the writers, artists, poseurs, and hangers-on in the New Orleans art scene of the 1920s and illuminates how this dazzling world faded as quickly as it began.