Abstract
Ludmila's life story is known solely from hagiographical texts. Even though the oldest collection of legends dates closely to the duchess's death, its reliability is complicated by the genre's nature.
The hagiographers paid little attention to the actual personality, their interest lay in the future martyr - the witness who followed Christ in his deeds and gave testament to his legacy and meaning to his sacrifice. The efforts to reconstruct Ludmila's life story thus reflect not only the gradual changes in the approach of modern historiography towards the critique of medieval sources but also the advances of Czech medieval studies in the last hundred years.
The interpretations of Ludmila's life and of the development of her posthumous cult hold many problematic questions of early medieval research, to which we have slim chance of ever finding a satisfactory answer and which shall therefore continue to attract the interest of the future generations of historians and those interested in the earliest history.