The Black Death plague constituted a major disruption of the ordinary pace of life of the society in early modern period. As such it attracted interest and drew attention. The Black Death menace caused panic and fear, and therefore various measures and actions which were supposed to prevent the outbreak of the plague or at least considerably limit its consequences were defined and carried out. Such practices were shaped by contemporary ideologies and mentalities and reflected everyday experience. The study of various means of dealing with the Black Death menace may be like looking in a mirror in which the curves of the quotidian lifestyle of the period are reflected. The present paper which analyses the last Black Death plague of 1713-1714 in the environment of a southBohemian town offers one such view. The mechanisms which the inhabitants of the regional capital Písek formulated and applied in the attempt to confront the iimpending Black Death menace, are specifically examined. The bearing of these mechanisms on contemporary devoutness is also problematized at the level of socalled semifolk discourse., Zdeněk Duda., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
The subject of this study is the issue of sickness, death and dying as approached in the first textbooks of pastoral theology. In the Catholic confessional environment of late 18th century Central Europe, pastoral theology was a new discipline that was about to be introduced into university curricula. The aim of this article is to outline and describe the concept of sickness and death with which the first textbooks of the new discipline worked in formulating new content and forms of spiritual care for the sick and dying. These, presented as binding on future spiritual administrators, defined itself against the older tradition and drew inspiration from Jansenist-Enlightenment approaches and thought. We mainly analyse two or three textbooks that were widely used in the Czech environment. They relied on the prescribed and most successful textbook of the Viennese pastoralist Franz Giftschütz, translated into Czech by the Olomouc teacher Václav Stach, and on the Czech scripts of Aegidius (Jiljí) Chládek, a Premonstratensian of Strahov Monastery and Prague university professor. The changes in the content and forms of Catholic preparation for death and of the concepts of illness and death must be understood in the context of the reforms that affected the field of spiritual education at this time, the new view of the person of the Catholic clergyman, and also the changes in religious and moral sentiments and the promotion and dissemination of medical knowledge and concepts also in the non-medical strata of society.