The Visio Pauli, one of the most popular ‘Visions’ of the Middle Ages, constitutes the European form of an originally Oriental apocrypha known as ‘The Apocalypse of Paul’. On its journey through the Latin Middle Ages this text was used in many ways, which have fundamentally influenced its textual shape. The article outlines concisely the dissemination of the Visio Pauli in the Medieval West, its incorporation into new, shifting transmission patterns and textual combinations. It will be shown that the Eastern apocrypha from late Antiquity, the Paulus-Apocalypse, and its reworked European version, the Visio Pauli – the first a closed, the second an open text – in their complex transmission histories represent two entirely different realisations of one and the same material. The analysis, however, concentrates on the specific Bohemian redaction and its Old Czech version. The shape of a text will here be conceived in terms of its dissemination and concrete uses. The focus of the investigation consists, therefore, in the ways in which the variable and open were fixed, and the circumstances, consequences and description of this process. From material to text, from text to context, or, the other way round, from context to text – these are the aspects of the literary, structural, and functional analysis of the Visio Pauli in the context of cultural history. This approach constitutes an attempt to describe the text transmission differently from conventional textual criticism, and how to think about the shape of medieval texts in the context of their concrete use and function. The article is a reworking of a lecture given at Prague and Brno in 2008 and is essentially an abridged version of the author’s Ph.D. thesis, Die Visio Pauli: Wege und Wandlungen einer orientalischen Apokryphe im lateinischen Mittelalter unter Einschlus der alttschechischen und deutschsprachigen Textzeugen, Leiden and Boston: Brill (Mittellateinische Studien und Texte 34), 2006. It is the first written presentation of this research in Czech.
A calculation of pararmeters, method of manufacturing procedure and results of testing are described for the Wolter 1 X-ray mirror system. It consists of 2 nested pairs of mirrors: the outer pair has input diameter 24 cm and nickel coating, the inner pair - 13 cm and gold coating. The focal distance is 41,9 cm, the length of each paraboloid and hyperboloid - 24 cm. Geometrical parameters of the mirrors were chosen to obtain maximum effective area under the limits for overall dimensions.The mirrors were manufactured in the Astronomical Institute of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences
jointly with some other Czechoslovak institutes. The mirrors were made as galvanic replicas with metallic reflecting surface and plastic base. The system was intended for use in the X-ray telescope RT-4M, developed in the P. N. Lebedev Physical Institute of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R.