Super altare in ecclesia tua. The Beginnings of Parish Organisation in the Czech Lands from an Archaeological Perspective
2014
Abstract
The authors deal with the issues of the beginnings of the parish system in the Czech lands, which formed the prerequisites for a deeper Christianisation of the rural milieu. Based on the distinctive transformations in burials observable in a large part of Bohemia and Moravia, they place the beginnings in the period around 1100 A.
D. The evidence of the archaeological sources is confronted with the testimony of the written evidence and critically also with the conception of art historians, who do not suppose a boom of sacral architecture in the rural milieu until the second half of the 12th century and later.
The shift of the beginning of parish organisation further into the past opens a number of historical and methodological questions.