The article focuses on early theatre criticism in Prague and Vienna at the end of the 18th century. It analyzes the argumentational forms and critical strategies. The 1790s are represented by three periodicals: Der Wahrheitsspiegel (Prague 1796-1798), Österreichische Monatsschrift (Prague - Vienna 1793-1794) and Der Theatralische Eulenspiegel (Prague 1797). The study is based on a close reading of six specific theatre critiques. It deals with epoch-typical critical postulates, with taste (Geschmack), impartiality (Unparteilichkeit) and the aesthetic concept of theatre as a real illusion (wahre Täuschung). This analysis of individual attitudes is also a contribution to the description and interpretation of theatre history and repertoire reforms., Alena Jakubcová jun., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
This article charts the path and the activity of the Andalusian nobleman Pero Tafur in the Czech lands at the end of 1438 and beginning of 1439. The visit formed part of his extensive four-year journey across European countries, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean. The main motive was to meet with King of the Romans and of Bohemia Albert II. The meeting occured in February 1439 in Wroclaw, where Tafur arrived via Prague and Saxony in the entourage of the royal chancellor Kaspar Schlick, and from there he continued through Moravia to the south to Austria. The rather obscur testimony of the well-travelled knight is not only a remarable document of this monarch as a person and the contemporary historical context of Albert´s brief reign, but also provides an interesting image of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia in the atmosphere of the slowly extinguishing Hussite wars., Jaroslav Svátek., and Obsahuje literaturu a odkazy pod čarou
From the 1780s on, the court of the Princes of Schwarzenberg generally maintained four or five personal doctors. These privileged positions were frequently held by individuals who also practised as municipal or county physicians. In their castles in Bohemia the Schwarzenbergs also employed surgeons and apothecaries, and in line with the professionalization of medical care during the Enlightenment they attached great importance to the training of health workers. In the first three decades of the 19th century health care in the context of the Schwarzenberg primogeniture became even more specialized and the number of medical staff on the various Schwarzenberg estates increased. In addition to their own physicians, the Schwarzenbergs also entrusted their health needs to eminent medical experts drawn primarily from the Habsburg court and the University of Vienna and later, from the 1830s on, to many doctors working in the Czech Lands. This study considers the relationship between the high nobility as representatives of social elites on the one hand and the Enlightenment medicalization of society with its professionalization of health care on the other. It maps the structure of medical care within one aristocratic family and their estates and its transformation over a fifty‐year period. It also attempts to discover who the Schwarzenbergs’ doctors were and what socio‐cultural background they came from., Václav Grubhoffer., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
The present study aims at sketching some aspects of the last phase of existence of one mixed Czech-German community (Karlov-Libinsdorf), on the basis of ethnographic and historical sources. It offers a reflection of a more general process from the point of view of a local microlevel, a process that finally resulted in the ethnic homogneization of the Czech lands. The analysis of the controversy fo r national character of the community is being realized, on the one hand, through the study of the competition for the character of national schools in the locality, and, on the other hand, through the symbolical importance that the contesting parties ascribed to the existence of this mixed enclave. As a result of the general ethnic homogneization, the inhabitants of the naturally double-language community were confronted with the necessity of the unequivical declaration of their ethnicity. The nacionalization of the collective identity of the local inhabitants and the necessity of the „actualization“ of this identity according to the political situation of the moment was being imposed through the general social context and through the movement of „ethnic defense“ that was being incited from the outside, by the representants of the „defense associations“ The possible alternatives, however, were in competition one to another and, at the same time, they were inconsistent with the „traditional“ local (i.e. non-ethnic) identity. This dilemma hadbeen „imported“ from the outside, from the makrosocial level, but had to be solved on the level of local everyday life. In the situation of real existence of two different (ethnic) linguistic groups in the community under study, however, didn't exist the need to express the social reality through explicitly ethnical cathegories. If this expression was realized, it was in the direction to the outside, especially as a reaction to the demands from part of the State administration to define unequivocally the ethnic denomination - for example, for the use of the population censuses at the times of the Austria-Hungary and the Czechoslovak Republic or during the Protectorate when asking for the citizenship of the Protectorate or of the Reich - or in connexion with the regular interventions of the nationally outspoken activists. Similarly, also the institutionalized form of the „national struggle“ that seemingly found its possibility for expression in creating theparallel social structures in the community acquired such imposed character. There are many arguments for the assumption that the rivalry of the nationalist associations didn’t stem from the authentic local conditions. The local inhabitants could not be labeled as the ori and ginators of the conflicts with nationalist bacground, even though they have been sometimes perceived as the actors of such conflicts. We can sum up that the nationalization of the social ties didn’t occur spontaneously and represents rather a product of the interventions to the life of the community and a response to the ethnic enunciation imposed from the outside