The aim of the article is to characterise for the first time ever the role of book culture in building the confessionality of post-Hussite society and subsequent generations. For such an extensive research goal, it was necessary to choose a broad interdisciplinary approach, making it possible to place social phenomena previously assessed in isolation into the context of the day. The individual passages of the article are therefore devoted to editorial models, to the archaeology of the printed text and the basics of reading, to the history of illustration and book printing, to language and bookbinding. It has been confirmed that book culture - created by the reception of manuscript and printed products - can be understood as a faithful mirror of a religiously pluralistic society. However, where modern historiography ends with the research of confessionality, the study of book culture may begin to reveal the much more general mechanisms of the individual and social mentality in which the religious-political process took place. The mentality of the readers (burghers and partly the lesser aristocracy) for whom the copied and printed books were intended, was negatively impacted by the remnants of Hussitism and by contemporary Utraquism, which coexisted in a dualistic symbiosis with minority Catholicism. These influences, which at the time were commonly referred to as “renaissance”, bound readers to the Middle Ages. The more massive growth of their intellectual potential was made possible only by the cultural restart brought about by the change in the political situation after the Schmalkaldic War of 1547, which met with a somewhat negative response in both earlier and modern historiography. However, through the study of book culture, we are becoming convinced that the bourgeoisie began to compensate for the privileges which the monarch had deprived them of through various forms of self-education and self-presentation, by means of which it revived itself from these medieval residuals and at the same time competed with the aristocracy., Petr Voit., Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy, and Stuart Roberts [překladatel]
The study offers a basic overview of the manuscripts of the ars memorativa treatises in late medieval Czech lands. On the basis of the surviving evidence it is possible to prove that during the 15th century this ancient art (however suspicious and cumbersome it may seem today) was known and practiced here. It coexisted with general (often primarily medical) set of advices on efficient studying some of which openly criticize the art of memory for being too impractical. Besides copies of Italian and West European art of memory models, there is a number of these treatises and shorter treatments of the art composed in the Czech lands. Each of them includes specific features and innovations not encountered elsewhere. The manuscript context of ars memorativa shows that it was not seen as a part of rhetoric theory intended for a restricted number of intellectuals but as a means of storing and recuperating important information actively used especially by students and preachers. and Lucie Doležalová.