This text considers the early creative output of Ignác Cornova, in particular his lesserknown odes and his war poetry. It draws on contemporary research of the latter third of the 18th century focussing on the dynamic social change of the period, the transformation of the media, the emergence of a modern ‘public’, and changing perceptions of artistic as opposed to educational output. One of the difficulties of conceptualizing this period is the existence of two opposing trends – the older ‘Baroque’ tradition and the more ‘modern’ currents of the future national movement. Our text largely obviates this dichotomy by proposing a framework in which Cornova’s oeuvre is seen as evidence of an idiosyncratic cultural situation with its own features and markers. The aim of our study is to place Cornova’s early works within the literary context of his time – a context hard to appreciate today. We are not looking for the ‘future’ Cornova in those beginnings, nor the ‘embryos’ of his later development. Rather, we hope to rehabilitate the literary context in the Czech lands in the 1770s and 1780s as it veered between late Baroque odes, war reportage, and enlightenment patriotism. Alongside Cornova we consider now forgotten figures such as Vojtěch Koťara, Michael Denis, Johann Joseph Eberle and Václav Thám. The result is not a group biography, but rather a problem analysis of one segment of a period that defies unequivocal definition.
This article is a response to Daniela Tinková’s study Enlightenment as ‘vernacularization of knowledge’. In the first part we comment on the positive aspects of Tinková’s conception of the history of the Enlightenment, but also on the lack of clarity concerning the nature of knowledge as both a component of cultural transfer and the outcome of that process. The second part changes perspective, focussing on ‘the transfer of Enlightenment’ and the ‘radiation’ of Enlightenment from the Czech Lands to surrounding regions of the Habsburg monarchy, especially Galicia. For this reason the Czech Lands assumed a regional hegemony in many areas of administration and economic and intellectual life. We also attempt to explain the motivations for accepting ‘Enlightenment knowledge’ while relativizing the power asymmetries in these processes.
Fictional King of Morocco is mythical figure of Biblical proportions, herald of Apocalypse, usually associated with prophetical songs of Tolerance Sectarians from eastern Bohemia. Presented article deals with the motif of King of Morocco in these songs and tries to analyze its origin. Various sources of this oral tradition are discussed, like great influence of Protestant political prophecies, heterodox prophecies and folklore narratives of the period. The character of King of Morocco represents an affiliated motif to a specific corpus of oral traditions, consisting of apocalyptical narrative pattern about the Judgment Day. Origin of the motif of King of Morocco remains obscure; however, the popular reception of diplomatic visit of envoy of Sultan of Morocco to Vienna in 1783, combined with misinterpreted news about Tolerance Decree, seems to be the most probable source. Although associated with oral culture of Tolerance Sectarians, the whole narrative pattern was disseminated more widely and lived on in Czech oral tradition at least until 1848.
Was Ignác Cornova’s contribution to Czech-language literature only that of a historian? In the 1770s and 1780s he also happened to be the most acclaimed poet in Bohemia. Of the many reactions to Cornova’s work from German and Czech writers, this study focuses on Nábožné písně pro katolického měšťana a sedláka k veřejným a domácím službám božím (Religious Songs for the Catholic Townsman and Countryman for Use in Public and Domestic Divine Service, 1791) by Václav Stach, with a verse dedication to Cornova. It emphasises that under the Habsburg monarchy the genre of religious songs and hymns was also a platform for forming a new readership and literary public, providing a vehicle for writers such as Michael Denis, Ignaz Cornova, Johann Peter Hofmann and Václav Stach himself for creative experimentation and a mutually beneficial communication of their work to the public. In this context, our study examines the conceptual and aesthetic links between Stach and the poetic models of Ignác Cornova.
Although much has been written about Czech coronations, one of them has gone almost unnoticed. This article focuses on the coronation of Francis II as King of Bohemia, which took place in 1792, a year after the lavish coronation of his father Leopold II. This article examines it in the context of the other coronations of Francis in the same year and documents the entire process of its preparation, from the ceremonial entry into Prague to practical aspects such as security arrangements, accommodation and lighting. Since the entire course of the coronation ceremony itself is already well documented and remained unchanged in Francis’s case, attention is given to a particular part of the coronation mass, namely the accolation of the Knights of St Wenceslas. The paper also deals with the concept of “the people” and the Bubeneč folk celebration, as the latter was an important part of the coronation festivities.
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 author deals with Baroque pilgrimages to Styrian Mariazell where people searched for help and solace, or they came there with gratitude for grace received from heaven. The information is drawn from surviving archival sources of both printed and written nature; these include pilgrim handbooks, books of miracles, and the direct testimony of a participant (celfotr) from the South Moravian town of Znojmo. The study focusses on the pilgrim and his or her duties associated with the preparation for the pilgrimage, such as providing for the farm and arranging money for the journey, but spiritual preparation was also important. The journey itself and the activities associated with the pilgrimage practice are also reflected. The main purpose of the journey was to see the object of reverence, the marvellous statue of the Virgin Mary; this was accompanied by ritualised acts, but the pilgrimage also had a completely secular aspect, such as purchase of various devotionals related to the pilgrimage site. The return journey did not have as strict rules as the journey to the pilgrimage site, but there are also interesting elements, e. g. the regular visit to Maria Taferl, another important Marian pilgrimage site in Lower Austria. Pilgrimages of Moravian inhabitants to Mariazell are observed in the period of the greatest flowering of this phenomenon in the first two thirds of the 18th century, but for capacity reasons the author does not take into account essential changes concerning Baroque religiosity that took place in the last third of the 18th century.
This paper deals with the personality and the work of the noble, writer and intellectual Maximilian count Lamberg (1729–1792) which was already examined by several Czech historians (Polišenský, Kroupa, Cerman). Firstly, the paper evaluates the current state of research to show that despite of the attention of researchers focused on this personality, there are still lot of contexts and details which remain unknown. Secondly, the paper analyses the question of the relevance and the historical value of Lamberg’s conserved works which are situated between memories, essays and autobiographical fiction. In the main part of the paper, the thesis of Jiří Kroupa, which assumes the appurtenance of Maxmilian Lamberg both to the Moravian milieu and to the European Republic of letters, is examined. Lamberg’s accessible works, not only the most famous Mémorial d’un mondain but also the other books, are used as a base of the research.
A number of art historians have noted how in around 1800 the social function of the visual arts in the Czech Lands fundamentally changed and a new ideal of bourgeois vizuality emerged. At the same time, visual culture in the Age of Enlightenment came to be seen as a ‘movement of knowledge’ through different cultural spheres. Reacting to the discussion of Daniela Tinková’s view of the Enlightenment as a process of spreading and democratizing knowledge and extending information networks, the present text develops these ideas and considers other ways in which art in the Czech Lands during the Enlightenment could be conceptualized. We point out that new centres of culture and broad-based social penetration brought not only changes in the way information on the visual arts was disseminated, but a new situation in which the exchange of knowledge across a variety of social and educational fields was no longer restricted to the hitherto clearly defined professions that had established the prevailing terminology and methodology in their own domains. For example, professional artists might now explore all sorts of fields of knowledge, while traditional humanistic art-theoretical discourse began to attract not only dilettante ‘amateurs’ but also a new class of professional art experts and critics with no formal artistic training. and The study of art thus became an independent branch of knowledge, a component of education, a source of cultural and historical memory, and a badge of patriotism and personal identity. A similar shift can be observed in modes of visual perception, which in the Enlightenment were moulded by an endeavour to extend the traditional range of art consumers and recipients by means of aesthetically oriented education and training. There was also a clear attempt to fulfil the ideal of public art based on modern criteria of ‘taste’, aimed at eliminating persisting social barriers and the cultural monopoly of established aristocratic elites and creating a template for a bourgeois visual culture (sensibility, reappraisal of hierarchy of genres, instruction in drawing, growth of graphic art, etc.). This movement of knowledge also made it far easier for recipients to find their bearings in the art market (exhibitions, reviews, advertisements) by providing them with criteria for judging the quality of artworks and, more generally, promoting the visuality of the dawning industrial age (public access to art collections, industrial exhibitions, the first museums, etc.), and hence to a hitherto unseen extent opening up the world of visual art to the wider public.
This study, in the form of an essay or first draft of opening remarks delivered at an international conference on Culture in the Age of Enlightenment, presents one of many possible models for the conceptualization of the Enlightenment in the Czech Lands. Here Enlightenment is conceived as a process whereby ‘knowledge’ (information) is disseminated and gradually democratized and information networks are expanded. This conception draws primarily on theories of vernacularization and cultural transfer. In view of the directional dynamic, we have focussed mainly on ‘unidirectional’ flow in the sense of dispersal from (informational/cultural) centres to the (informational/cultural) periphery – both socioeconomically (transfer to lower social classes) and geographically (transfer to rural areas remote from major urban and educational centres). In this model, the process of vernacularization and democratization of knowledge was divided into three periods: the early formation of educated elites; the ‘acculturation’ of the middle classes; and the extension of information networks to the petty intelligentsia – and through them to the wider rural population. This last phase, carried out as part of a ‘programme’ of popular enlightenment around the turn of the 19th century, more or less coincided, in the theory Miroslav Hroch, with the first and second phases of the Czech National Revival and relied on the same media (Czech-language newspapers, ‘popular’ literature) and authors (Kramerius, Tomsa, Rulík, et al.)