Abstract
The paper shows a veriety of ways in which 14th-century Czech and French literature and its visual representation reflected the socioeconomic changes brought about by the colonization and deforestation waves of the previous centuries. The transformation of landscape, society and economy - which had affected both Bohemia and France in profound ways - came to be portrayed both in positive and negative terms within narratives produced in the 13th and 14th centuries.
While foundation narratives such as Mélusine or the Dalimil Chronicle depicted, for ideological purposes, the exploitation in larger-than-life, glorificatory, unproblematic terms, other texts, such as the legend Ut Annuncietur II - a version of the life of Saint Wenceslas - and its visual representations, or the romance Arthur de Bretagne, put emphasis on the day-to-day socioeconomic effects of the long-term changes and even point to hardships endured as their result.