Abstract
The Treatise Utraquism and Bookprinting chronologically follows the symbiosis between the capital and Utraquism, recognised by the state as a second religion alongside Catholicism on the basis of the Basel Compactata. The well-preserved scriptographic practices of Prague printers provide no significant or extensive evidence that printing workshops of the Jagellonian Prague were involved in the pedagogic agenda of the local university, unlike in Cracovia, Vienna, Leipzig, Venetia, Padua or in other central-European metropoles.
To understand this anomalous situation, we have to turn to humanism. Abroad, this intellectual movement provided a stable framework for the involvement of printing in pedagogy, as it contributed to innovations in the teaching practices of exact sciences, in editors' attitudes towards the legacy of Antiquity, as well as in printing types and the printing press itself.
This process initaited in the 1490s was slow and heterogenous, since even foreign universities were still deeply embedded in the scholastic culture; nonetheless, nowhere else in Europe was the influence of humanism hindered by the theologically underdeveloped and socially conservative Utraquism. The Czech edition of the Bible benátská (Venetian Bible), published in 1506 by Peter Lichtenstein with the assistance of Prague publishers, provides an excellent example.
This publication theoretically had the potential to alleviate the scepticism to the Italian Renaissance and, especially, the roman printing types, rejected by the Utraquists and non-Catholics alike as the font of the Papal Rome. However, the printers decided to stick with a traditional typeface rather than adopting the roman printing types, which - given the Bible's commercial success - only reinforced the late Gothic attitudes of the bourgeois society.
More opportunities for the penetration of innovative Renaissance trends into the Prague book culture came with the establishment of the Hebrew (from 1512) and the Church-Slavonic printing workshops, briefly operated by the Belarussian physician Franciscus Heorhij Skorina (1517-1519). Nevertheless, isolated in terms of language, confession and readership, none of these stylistically advanced branches could have left a profound mark on the local Czech culture.
The first hints of Renaissance and humanist influences do not appear until Mikuláš Konáč (1507-1528), a linguistically gifted Christian printer active in Prague in the first third of the sixteenth century. Relying on rather careless and unoriginal typography - unlike his diligent contemporary Jan Šmerhovský (1519) -, Konáč's own translations brought into circulation not only medieval, but also ancient and foreign Renaissance texts.
Moreover, he developed his own original system of prosaic and versed paratexts, inspired by trends in the foreign humanist literature. Nonetheless, Konáč's dedications, forewords and epilogues suggest that pleasure reading was not yet commonplace among the bourgeoisie.
The last representative of printing in Prague, restricted by the conservative Utraquism, was the Bohemian physician Jan Chocenský (1542-1544) who followed the artisanal legacy of Mikuláš Konáč.