The historical Unity of Brethren produced a relatively large amount of literature, mainly intended for the clergy and members of this community. From the turn of the 16th and 17th centuries, the diversity of genres increased, and after 1609, when Rudolf II issued the Letter of Majesty granting religious freedom, the censorship measures were relaxed in Bohemia. As a result, the printing house that the Unity ran in the Moravian town of Kralice nad Oslavou was falling short of production capacity. The Unity’s leadership thus had to approach commercial printing companies, especially in the capital of the kingdom (Prague), but also in Hradec Králové, to satisfy the growing demand of Brethren literature. This study seeks to explore the main reasons for choosing specific printing enterprises to produce publications with Brethren religious texts and the extent to which these preferences were influenced by the printers’ confessional attitudes. The findings of this study show that what played an important role was not only the printers’ confessional affiliation, or their inclinations for the Unity of Brethren, but also their personal ties to the authors of the published texts, or to the contractors of the publication production. Especially noteworthy for this research is the preserved correspondence from the archive of a Unity of Brethren bishop Matouš Konečný, who worked in Mladá Boleslav between 1609 and 1620 and was responsible for the entire literary production of the community as well as its dissemination among the followers. The archive of Matouš Konečný was discovered quite recently in 2006 and is now gradually being released in a scholarly edition. The main contribution of this study is the analysis of the ties between the commercial printers who printed books for the Unity of Brethren in the early 17th century and this relatively small in number but culturally and socially influential confessional community.
The article deals with the notion of exile and its significance in the Armenian historical and literary discourse. The exile represents in the Armenian context one of the cornerstones of Armenian ethnicity construction and it could be said without exaggeration, that Armenian history (both medieval and modern) is pervaded by this dominant or more precisely "key" theme. The exile symbolizes primarily the concept of uprootedness (exile from the country as well as the alienation from the society), which is conceived in close connection with the search for identity itself. In other words, the exile can be considered as a kind of "rite de passage" - the position on the border or "threshold" between two cultures, languages and worlds.