he paper quantitatively analyses a sample of 300 Czech prayer books and other popular religious handwritten material (not including songbooks) from the 18th and 19th centuries. The author maintains that most of the material consisted of (partial) transcriptions of popular printed books and their widespread popularity was influenced by the growth of literacy and the individualization of piety. Their use was by no means limited to the milieu of the secret non-Catholics which were proscribed until 1781; indeed the majority of Catholic writings were not fully orthodox. The character and decoration of the writings in question were not directly related to the confessional nature of their originators and/or users; in fact the general rules of early modern popular culture played a much more important role and in many cases it is difficult to determine whether the source is catholic, protestant or sectarian. Prayer books fully reflected official forms of religion relatively late i.e. from the tum of the 18th and 19th centuries as a result of church domination over popular piety. However, even at this time the process did not result in absolutes: religious writings substituted the non-existence of baroque literature the printing of which was prohibited by the enlightened censorship prevalent at the time. Only a change in religious forms and new opportunities for the printing of pre-enlightenment books in the mid-19th century led to a decline in handwritten prayer books.
The article analyses popular prayer books preserved in regional museums of Bohemia and described in the Inventory of the 17th and 18th century manuscripts from the Museum collections in Bohemia I-II (they comprise in total 3298 manuscripts from 94 museums). After a short introduction dealing with the principal characteristics of these manuscripts (viewed partly as an instance of entrepreneurial manuscript publication), their potential scribes and the way these books were read and used as magical objects, it classifies them according to the date of origin, the language used and the gender and social status of their scribes and owners.
The case study presents the analysis of Slávo markrabství (Oh, Glory of Margraviate), a folk spiritual song celebrating St. Cyril and Methodius, the patron saints of Moravia. The song was recorded in 1906 according to oral interpretation on the village of Vnorovy in Moravia. The author investigates the relationship between function, history, and music in the document.
The article briefly summarises the history of the historical library in the convent of the Order of Preachers at St Giles’ in Prague. This is followed by a report on the grant project of an internal competition of the Faculty of Arts of Charles University the aims of which were to write scientific papers and to make a list of separately printed occasional sermons deposited in the mentioned library in archival boxes under shelf marks E II 97–461 and E III 118–255. The paper deals with the character of this collection of texts, their content, authors, and time and place of their origin. The investigation of the content of the boxes has revealed that the project may also help to specify some records in Bibliografie cizojazyčných bohemikálních tisků 1501–1800 (A Bibliography of Foreign-Language Printed Bohemica from 1501–1800; BCBT).
The article deals with the typology of Baroque frontispieces in printed books published in Bohemian and Moravian printing houses in 1618–1765, which is viewed in terms of the function of the frontispieces in printing. The paper contains a detailed analysis of the main thematic variants of frontispieces. The thematic variants are analysed with respect to the content and genre of the work concerned with the aim to determine the main marketing strategies of Bohemian and Moravian printers, publishers or booksellers in the visual promotion of their products.
The aim of this paper is to present the French historian Victor-Lucien Tapié, drawing on the years he spent in Bohemia with emphasis on translations of his writings and their reception. We focus on three main themes that pervade his work: people, nation and empire. We also consider his studies in art history, the Baroque and Classicism, and, related to this, his personal conception of the ‘history of civilization’.
Marian devotion has represented until today crucial aspect of Christian, especially Catholic, spirituality. Its extraordinary flourishing took plače in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, when Pietas Mariana became an imprescindible component of Baroque religiousness. The vigour of Baroque Marian devotion brought about not only the veneration of statues and pictures, but also the reintroduction of pilgrimages and the building of Marian pilgrimage sites throughout the land. One of the most influential Catholic orders that contributed in an important degree to development and spreading of Marian devotion was the Society of Jesus. Aside of their educational and pastora! activities, the Jesuits served as custodians of important Marian pilgrimage sites, as was also the case of the residence in Golčův Jeníkov, where they remained in the years 1657-1773. Throughout this time, they constructed Marian pilgrimage site of regional importance where religious brotherhood had been established and where Loretan devotion had been spread. The everyday life of the residence brought about many activities, among them the organization of festivals along the lines of Baroque ostentatiousness and regular radius of pilgrimages.