The closure of St George's Benedictine convent in Prague Castle in 1782 meant the end of a valuable convent library, whose size and contents we can only conjecture. Hitherto we have been aware of a set of 65 codices to be found for the most part in the Czech National Library fonds with individual items owned by the Prague National Museum Library and the Ősterreichische Nationalbibliothek in Vienna. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to the practically unknown St George codices which the Czech National Library purchased together with the Prague Lobkowicz library. These are four breviaries which were acquired by the Lobkowicz Library in 1835. Summer breviary XXIII D 156 was created before the mid-13th century undoubtedly in the environment of St George's Convent, while the somewhat older Calendarium is evidently not from St George's or of Bohemian origin at all. The winter breviary XXIII D 155 is ascribed to St George's Abbess Anežka (1355-1358). Summer breviary XXIII D 142 was created in 1359 for Sister Alžbeta, the codex decoration is from the workshop of master breviarist Grandmaster Lev. Summer breviary XXIII D 138, which is of artistic and iconographic interest, is the work of four scribes and two previously unknown illuminators.
This article argues that the concept of equivalence is one of the most important methodological aspects of valid and reliable measurement in cross-national survey research. The important topic of survey measure equivalence has not been systematically in Czech social science publications to date and this article hopes to address this gap in the literature. Consequently, the two main goals of this article are (1) to acquaint the reader with techniques that are used to find questions that are interpreted in the same way across countries before data collection and (2) to describe the testing and evaluation of measurement indicators’ equivalence or comparability after data collection. This study presents cognitive approaches to “good” question wording practices, best translation practices and the application of both ‘emic’ (culture specific) and ‘etic’ (culture universal) approaches to survey question design. After data collection a range of statistic techniques are usually employed ranging from basic statistics such as the mean to advanced approaches such as multi-group structural equation modelling, multilevel modelling, latent class modelling and Item Response Theory). This article describes some of these techniques in the context of measurement equivalence and its associated research literature.