Year: 2014
Type: article
Abstract: This paper attempts to examine the literary terrain marked out between the end of the 15th century and the year 1553, i.e. the period in which the first true Czech author, Václav Hájek of Libočany, author of the Czech Chronicle (1541), translator and adaptor of several Old Czech works, lived and worked. However, for this it was necessary both to confront some of the basically Marxist views held by mid‑20th researchers and to try to incorporate the well‑known facts into a higher entity called book culture. One of the period‑based dangers of Marxist paleo‑Czech studies was the evaluation of literary works on their own or without any interest in the specific nature of the communication process or the artistic and workmanlike aspects of publication, distribution and reading technique. -- One of the parameters of book culture is the readers’ reception of texts, which enables a readership community to be formed and cultivated. Book printing in Bohemia and Moravia played a much smaller role in this process than we have previously presumed, as the foremost church institutions, Prague University representatives and thus the printers themselves did not understand the social impact of book printing and at most thought of it as another form of business. The literary scene was so lacking in writers, translators and potential readers, who were mostly just from the increasingly emancipated middle classes, that books of such typographic standards were not produced in enough numbers to support the habit of quiet reading and thus enable intensive reading to slowly turn into extensive reading. Domestic book printing was greatly affected by the import of books from Germany and the strong scriptographic output of the intelligentsia there. -- While the literary epoch between Hussitism and the Battle of the White Mountain was called the Renaissance in the past, this was more a political than an objective matter. Contextualization of the literary scene using the entire book culture yardstick shows that a number of well‑known events will need to be set within a new interpretational framework. However, this involves too much of a heterogeneous and imperfect machinery, which cannot simply be called a Renaissance organism, as Renaissance influence on the majority of major national literatures was prepared for and supported by humanism. However, the literary scene in Bohemia and Moravia cannot be called extensive, and that part of it which was associated with printers was even less so. We do not find many surviving clear traces of the scientific and intellectual influence of humanism. It was not until the 1520s that humanism (and so the laicization process itself) achieved such strength among the burgeoning middle classes that it awoke, accelerated and maintained new artistic and crafts activities, reading habits and thus a love of books. -- For a long time most of the elements of book culture remained conservatively medieval (though of course with exceptions) and thanks to the surviving national genes were geared more to the Reformation than to the Renaissance. Hence even at the beginning of the 16th century the entire book culture reflected the intellectual closedness of Jagellon Bohemia and the innermost religious world of the Utraquists and Brethren. The worldly emphasis did not start to override the everyday discussions on the Eucharist until the 1530s and 1540s, i.e. at a time that was stirred both by the culture‑creating plans of Ferdinand I and by the anti‑Habsburg opposition within Estates society. It turns out that passive acceptance of 19th century art studies categories is no longer suitable for book culture, the solid backbone of which is formed by the literary scene. Future discussions ought to show the extent to which it is more appropriate to take on dynastic periodization, the internal cut‑off times of which (1520, 1547) apply to a nowhere dense set of Renaissance and humanist book culture phenomena without problems.
Author: Petr Voit
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W11719112