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.
It is two hundred years since the first biographers of Ignaz Cornova – ex-Jesuit scholar, Prague university professor and member of the Royal Bohemian Society of Sciences – mentioned his articles written for periodicals, but to date these remain unstudied. They have been neither collected nor analysed; we do not even know how many periodicals he contributed to. In his research on the subject, the author has identified six periodicals in which Cornova published between 1793 and 1814 and found thirteen separate texts – a figure that is almost certain to rise. His analysis of these articles supplements and refines the conclusions reached by historians on the basis of Cornova’s writings in book form. He is presented as a historian of Bohemia (and beyond), a Czech patriot, a Catholic, and a loyal subject of the House of Habsburg-Lorraine who was committed to educating society as a whole, especially in the field of history, and maintaining social peace.
The varied and contradictory perception of the personality and work of Bohuslav of Lobkowicz and Hassenstein in the early modern period was symbolically crowned in the Enlightenment by Ignaz Cornova’s biography, which is still the most comprehensive work dedicated to Hassenstein. After a brief recapitulation of research and the state of knowledge before Cornova, the study examines his approach to the material and the main substantive and formal features of his biography. Older Latin literature dealing with humanism plays an important role, as do contemporary models from the European literatures of the Enlightenment. Cornova’s work partly follows the traditional chronological approach, but several timeless chapters emerge from it, driven both by an interest in Bohuslav as an individual and by a desire to make a purposeful pedagogical impact on the reader. His aim was to present a rounded and engaging picture of Hassenstein’s life and literary output, based on his surviving works, especially his poems and correspondence, tastefully and without distracting remarks and comments. Ludwig Schubart, for example, with his biography of the German humanist Ulrich von Hutten, could have been a model for him in this respect. Brief mention is also made of the critical reviews of Cornova’s work, which he himself deals with in the preface to Hassenstein’s biography. A separate section is devoted to a comparison of the selection of poems translated by Cornova and his contemporaries Thám, Vinařický and Budík. Although the biography was considered Cornova’s most important work in his lifetime, was cited and received positive feedback, it is not very useful for contemporary research, unlike the works of Josef Truhlář, who was a few decades younger. From a scholarly point of view it falls short of contemporary demands and as a literary work is even more outdated, although (or perhaps because) it reflected the literary trends of the time.
Despite advances in research into religious orders over the last decades, the Jesuits are still associated (especially in popular consciousness) with their past as exponents of “darkness”. Yet the abolition of the Society of Jesus in 1773 did not mark a critical turning point, nor even a radical change; the Jesuits continued to flourish, and the odium they attracted from other orders was often retrospective in effect. Ignaz Cornova, an unusually interesting man of idiosyncratic temperament, was not the only “atypical” Jesuit, nor was he the only member of the Society of Jesus in the Bohemian provinces who was far from being an ossified upholder of the ways of the past. Besides Josef Stepling, provincial Bohemia could boast other remarkable personalities; and Prague’s Charles Ferdinand University, whose Faculty of Divinity was until 1773 dominated by Jesuits, was at the same time one of the great sources of Enlightenment thought.
This article looks at the debate on clerical celibacy among Czech theologians during the Enlightenment. Drawing largely on their writings, which in many cases served as textbooks in the training of future priests and thus had a significant impact, it analyses the origins, arguments and course of the debate. Doubts about the future of celibacy first appeared in canon law in the 1770s, conditioned in part by secular factors such as populationism. In the late 1780s clerical celibacy was publicly challenged by influential university theologians such as the church historian Kaspar Royko in Prague and the theologian Josef Lauber in Olomouc, a former Jansenist. Their main argument was the widespread non-compliance by priests and its harmful social consequences. The law also had its defenders (e.g. Franz Christoph Pittroff), whose main argument was the traditional one of the need for purity in the Eucharist. During the 1790s the public controversy about celibacy disappeared; but for many years the discourse on the subject remained strongly influenced by Enlightenment thinking.
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.)
This study is a response to the preceding discussion on the original essay on the concept of enlightenment. It examines the relationship between enlightenment, national revival and Romanticism, issues of popular enlightenment, and the role of the Catholic clergy in the Enlightenment, with further remarks on the phases and specific features of the Czech Enlightenment.
Wenzel Trnka von Krzowitz was born in 1739 in Tabor. He graduated from the University of Vienna, where after studying philosophy he studied at the Faculty of Medicine. His personality and systematic work attracted the attention of Gerard van Swieten, who in 1769 made a significant contribution to the institutional establishment of the first medical faculty in the Hungarian Lands. Trnka thus became one of the founding members of this faculty, where he was appointed professor of anatomy. The Faculty of Medicine was the last part of the Pázmany University to be established in Trnava, which could not meet the needs of a growing university, especially of the medical faculty itself, and so in 1777 the entire campus was moved to Buda. While still in Trnava, in 1775, Trnka published one of his most important works, Historia febrium intermittentium, in which he discusses intermittent fevers. These fevers were a relatively common and unpleasant phenomenon in Europe, especially in certain regions. They are caused by protozoa of the genus Plasmodium, discovered in the 19th century, which cause several types of malaria, all of them being characterised by periodic bouts of fever. In his work, Trnka discusses in detail both the actual course of the disease and the treatment, emphasizing the use of quinine bark. The work contains several historically valuable chapters. It describes views and treatments of malaria in the 18th century, focusing also on those areas in the Habsburg Monarchy where the disease was widespread. Through Trnka’s work, the article provides an insight into life with this now exotic disease, which is today of little concern in our part of the world.