In the Habsburg lands at the turn of the 19th century (as a consequence of Enlightenment critique of the legal, social and medical status quo), a change occurred in attitudes to voluntary death. This "new discourse" permeated all state-controlled institutions, being particularly evident in the transformation of teaching practice at medical schools and the introduction of new measures concerning self-willed death. This paper considers the reception of newly-introduced reforms - especially in law and medicine - in the Litoměřice region, and the impact of these changes on the way a suicide’s body was treated and where it was laid to rest. It addresses the question of how much and in what way official and medical investigations of suicides changed, which institutions were involved in such investigations, and how information was exchanged between the various judicial authorities. As a result of ever-closer collaboration between state institutions on the one hand and medical practitioners on the other, suicide in the Litoměřice region in the first half of the 19th century was, de facto, gradually decriminalized., Tereza Liepoldová., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
The study is based on an analysis of content and themes of the correspondence of the wellknown Enlightenment Era "provincial intellectual", a bank clerk from Čáslav Jan Ferdinand Opiz (1741-1812), with a country priest from the highlands on the border of Bohemia and Moravia, Karel Killar (1745-1806). Their correspondence - in most part hitherto unstudied - is deposited in the National Museum in Prague. It consists of more than 300 letters, written over a long period of 16 years (1793-1806), and it is fascinating for several reasons: it is conducted in French, which represents one of the very rare testimonies of a good knowledge of French in some members of other classes than the nobility in the 18th and 19th centuries; in this case, the use of French can be read as an implicit adherence to (French) Enlightenment, and perhaps even to the principles of the French Revolution. And it is the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars around which the entire correspondence revolves. Thanks to this we may not only form a deeper and more nuanced insight into Opitz, a wellknown sympathizer of the French Revolution, but also into the lesser known figure of Killar, a man of universal education and an Enlightenment era priest of Josephine stamp, who tried to integrate both the Enlightenment and the French Revolution within his firm Christian (Catholic) worldview., Daniela Tinková., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
This paper considers forms of cultural transfer in decorative design in Central Europe in the second half of the 18th century, focussing on works that combine aspects of both free creative art and artisan craftsmanship. Based on a detailed analysis of a number of works (or parts thereof), the authors show that trends in decoration that had hitherto been broadly interpreted as a somewhat uninventive adoption of fashionable French graphic pattern-books and picture albums in the "goût grec" style (Jean-François de Neufforge, Jean-Charles Delafosse et al.) in fact represented an innovative quest for an original modern synthesis taking its inspiration from classical Roman art (Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Giocondo Albertolli, Carlo Antonini) and developing ideas emerging from the recently introduced teaching of artistic design at the Vienna Academy and from circles close to the imperial court (Johann Baptist Hagenauer, Ignaz Josef Würth et al.). The whole phenomenon in considered within the wider context of official cultural policy at the time of Maria Teresa’s and Joseph II’s economic and administrative reforms and is interpreted as one of a number of processes and strategies which, for various reasons, led to a reduction in transcultural transfer. Decorative design in Central Europe in the latter half of the 18th century thus paid more than lip-service to the ideal of universal culture in the sense of transculturality, interpreting it in a specifically local, middle-European and to some extent "nationalized" way - and, from a historical perspective, with extraordinary success., Pavel Suchánek a Tomáš Valeš., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy