The Enlightenment and the Bohemian Reformation: a Liberal Paradigm Zdeněk V
Selected Papers from the 2003 SVU North American Conference, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 26-28 June 2003 The Enlightenment and the Bohemian Reformation: A Liberal Paradigm Zdeněk V. David, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars One Woodrow Wilson Plaza, 1300 Pennsylvania Avenue, NWWashington, D.C. 2004-3027 A perennial problem in Czech historiography has involved the relationship between modern Czech political culture, which emerged in the nineteenth century, and the Bohemian Reformation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and how to deal with the awkward 1620- 1780 intermezzo of the Counter Reformation. Traditionally, the two divergent viewpoints on this relationship were defined by Thomas Masaryk, who postulated a disruption in the Czech intellectual life between the sixteenth century and the Enlightenment, and by Josef Pekař, who sought to integrate the Counter Reformation into a seamless web of a continuous cultural development. Masaryk viewed the ideological content of the Awakening as liberal and universal, Pekař as ethnic and national. My presentation is concerned with recent literature dealing with the Czech National Awakening, its sources, character, and objectives. It surveys the leading treatments on the topic in Czech, English, Russian and German. The Marxist-Leninist literature of 1945-1990 appears, as might be expected, rather stereotypical, and hence (with some exceptions) not particularly illuminating, More notable are several major works on the Czech National Awakening, which were written and published outside an official doctrinaire framework, abroad or, if in Bohemia, after the Velvet Revolution. Finally, the most recent views from the turn of the second millennium are briefly examined. The survey finds that existing literature has paid scant attention to the substantive link between the sixteenth-century Utraquist culture and the National Awakening.
[Show full text]