Abstract
Czech society of the 15th century provided the earlier development of bookbinding with at least two stimuli that were to enrich blind printing with inimitable national specifics. First of all, we have in mind the domestic secularization process, crowned by a rare - from a European perspective - early interest in the Czech translation of the text of the Bible, which, however, clashed with the Latin and the German in the drastically truncated inscriptions on rollers and plates.
The supranational character of the motifs were to be diversified by a second stimulus, which was derived from illustra- tive woodcut and fine art for the sacral space. However, this store of the highly developed iconography of 15th century Hussite and Utraquist symbols was in fact not used in the field of book culture.
In contrast to other artistic disciplines in the Czech Lands and to bookbinding from abroad, domestic blind printing in practice gave up patriotism - with the exception of the two Habsburgs (Ferdinand I and Rudolf II) we have for example no portraits of earlier Czech monarchs; we encounter the Bohemian lion on some six plates, but throughout the whole of the century the patron saint St. Wenceslas appears on just one plate.
It follows from this context that the term "Renaissance"is ambiguous for domestic book culture. If the decorative style of Czech bookbinding of the 16th century is to this day called Renaissance, then this is only because of the older petrified idea that all artistic values created during this epoch must automatically be Renaissance (architecture, music, literature, drawing, painting, graphics).
However, this idea is a dangerous generalization, because a symptom of uncontaminated Renaissance binding is the free space, which the conservative entality of Czech society began to accept only in the second half of the century.