Abstrakt
Our ideas regarding the origins of humanism in the Czech lands are based on Kristeller's now classic "narrow" view of this school as a philological and philosophical trend. At the turn of the 16th century an active role in the literary scene was taken (with only some exceptions) by Utraquist priests, who with the aid of translations inter alia were endeavouring to reform the declining post-Hussite society.
Emphasis was placed on religious education and the cultivation of morality in accordance with the early Christian church. This trend, which we have described with the new term protoRevival, has for the most part nothing to do with scholarly humanism either at the level of translation or in occasional original works - but this does not detract from its exceptional importance.
Religious rigorism and linguistic patriotism were not unique to conservative Utraquism, but can also be found in non-conformist religious communities. These small churches, motivated by confessional priorities, also rejected non-religious education and the tuition of foreign languages (Greek and Hebrew), while their leaders' activities were incompatible with humanist interests.
Only the religiously syncretic centre in Náměšť aimed to keep pace with the rest of Europe. It was here for the first time, if only very briefly between 1533 and 1535, that the potential for undiluted humanism emerged, thanks to Erasmus's critically reformed method of translating, as well as to the domestic scholarly interest in the Czech language.
At the level of Biblical translation the Unity of Brethren did not emerge from their Czech isolation until relatively late in comparison with the German reformation in the early 1560s. During the post-Hussite period, the substantial minority of Catholics came closest to the antique tradition and humanist thinking thanks to their studies at universities abroad, while the needs and readership skills of the primarily Utraquist society were not suitable, so that those individuals capable of literary expression had to rely on publishing in Latin abroad.
However, while they performed their sacerdotal service in the Catholic church, the pluralist religious model in the Czech lands outwardly muted their humanist orientation and actually bolstered their active anti-Reformation stance. Members of humanist circles in Olomouc and Plzeň only published abroad to a very minimum extent, as the predominant form of creative activity had come to be unpublished correspondence with the character of private but not open literary letters; whence the modern-age aphoristic designation "writers 212 Petr Voit without literature".
The post-1547 political changes did not just provide the literary and book-printing sphere with a new censorship model, as is often pointed out, but it also accelerated and deepened positive-acting phenomena that occasionally appeared after several decades. Religious-educational and moral cultivation of society started to be more motivated by an interest in enlightenment, language education and economic growth.
New knowledge, passed down from classical antiquity and the Middle Ages, was disseminated among the burghers and aristocrats in the form of translations, or more frequently by means of adaptations of German originals, or less frequently by means of original Czech or Latin texts. The intervention by the authorities in the status of the towns, and so by extension in the mentality of their inhabitants, brought about one more change in the literary sphere after 1547, temporarily relieved of its religious controversies, creating a space for the promotion of Renaissance Latin poetry.
Here antiquity was truly of constitutive importance, although primarily as a source of imitations of classical pre-texts. In this regard an indisputably important catalyst was Collin's reform of pedagogical procedures at Prague University.
Of course, the presentation of Latin poetry by Bohemian and Moravian printing houses would not have been possible without antiqua. This previously unknown association might appear strange to paleo-Bohemists and neo-Latinists, but it also shows that literary and book culture cannot be separated in modern-era studies.
The belated arrival of antiqua, brought about by disapproving confessional standpoints, came to act as another yardstick for assessing relations between the Czech lands and European cultural trends until 1536.