A Blessed Shore: England and Bohemia from Chaucer to Shakespeare. By Alfred Thomas. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 239, frontispiece and 15 figures. $45.

Alfred Thomas began putting bohemia back on the map for English literary historians with his previous book Anne's Bohemia: Czech Literature and Society, 1310­1420 (1998). the kingdom had begun disappearing from the political as well as the mental map of Europe in 1620 with the loss of the Protestant army at the battle of the White Mountain near Prague, and its position further eroded during the course of the thirty Years' War. After its nineteenth-century status as a "colonized country," the Czechoslovak Republic emerged in 1918 under the treaty of Versailles only to fall victim to Nazi occupation in the 1930s, and then to disappear again on the eastern side of the Iron Curtain for most of the remainder of the twentieth century. the Czech Republic's freedom from Soviet domination has liberated cultural historians, too, to envisage more clearly the nation's centrality in Europe, especially during the medieval and Renaissance periods covered by the book under review, when bohemians and Englishmen tended to view each other's country as synonymous with the utopian ideals of the early Church.