Confessionality and Mentality between the End of the 15th and the Second Half of the 16th Century from the Perspective of Czech Book Culture
Abstract
The aim of the article is to characterise for the first time ever the role of book culture in building the confessionality of post-Hussite society and subsequent generations. For such an extensive research goal, it was necessary to choose a broad interdisciplinary approach, making it possible to place social phenomena previously assessed in isolation into the context of the day.
The individual passages of the article are therefore devoted to editorial models, to the archaeology of the printed text and the basics of reading, to the history of illustration and book printing, to language and bookbinding. It has been confirmed that book culture - created by the reception of manuscript and printed products - can be understood as a faithful mirror of a religiously pluralistic society.
However, where modern historiography ends with the research of confessionality, the study of book culture may begin to reveal the much more general mechanisms of the individual and social mentality in which the religious-political process took place. The mentality of the readers (burghers and partly the lesser aristocracy) for whom the copied and printed books were intended, was negatively impacted by the remnants of Hussitism and by contemporary Utraquism, which coexisted in a dualistic symbiosis with minority Catholicism.
These influences, which at the time were commonly referred to as "renaissance", bound readers to the Middle Ages. The more massive growth of their intellectual potential was made possible only by the cultural restart brought about by the change in the political situation after the Schmalkaldic War of 1547, which met with a somewhat negative response in both earlier and modern historiography.
However, through the study of book culture, we are becoming convinced that the bourgeoisie began to compensate for the privileges which the monarch had deprived them of through various forms of self-education and self-presentation, by means of which it revived itself from these medieval residuals and at the same time competed with the aristocracy.