Charles Explorer logo
🇬🇧

The Czech Heaven: Medieval Utraquist Sermons on Czech Patron Saints

Publication at Faculty of Arts |
2022

Abstract

The sermons of Jan Hus and the Czech Utraquists about the Czech patrons have not been much studied. There is a recent quantitative analysis of them and several studies on the transmission of texts about St.

Wenceslas and St. Ludmila.

This paper will deal with their totality. It will present a revised quantitative analysis as well as its representation as a Sankey diagram.

In addition, it will seek to detail the manuscript transmission of sermons on the most popular Czech saints among the Czech Hussites (at least in terms of the number of surviving unique sermons), Saint Vitus and Saint Procopius. We assume that even in these sermons, it will be possible to trace the shared patterns followed by the Czech Hussites.

It will be even more interesting to assess whether the sermons of the Hussite centrist party (as with St. Wenceslas) or of the Hussite conservatives (as with St.

Ludmila) were most influential for these saints. The paper will also consider the sermons on the feast days of other Czech saints who were less popular (St.

Sigismund, the Five Brothers, St. Adalbert, and Sts.

Cyril and Methodius) in order to complete the picture.