In the Habsburg lands at the turn of the 19th century (as a consequence of Enlightenment critique of the legal, social and medical status quo), a change occurred in attitudes to voluntary death. This "new discourse" permeated all state-controlled institutions, being particularly evident in the transformation of teaching practice at medical schools and the introduction of new measures concerning self-willed death. This paper considers the reception of newly-introduced reforms - especially in law and medicine - in the Litoměřice region, and the impact of these changes on the way a suicide’s body was treated and where it was laid to rest. It addresses the question of how much and in what way official and medical investigations of suicides changed, which institutions were involved in such investigations, and how information was exchanged between the various judicial authorities. As a result of ever-closer collaboration between state institutions on the one hand and medical practitioners on the other, suicide in the Litoměřice region in the first half of the 19th century was, de facto, gradually decriminalized., Tereza Liepoldová., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
Suicide in the Habsburg monarchy in the Early Modern Age has hitherto received almost no attention. This text considers attitudes to suicide in the context of questions of sin, conscience and individualization. It traces the changing perceptions of the meaning of these phenomena through theological and moral-philosophical texts, and does so on four levels: (1) suicide as a theme (or non- theme) in 17th and 18th century theology and homiletics; (2) suicide in the reformist theology of the late 18th century; (3) the question of penance; (4) the "good death" and individual responsibility for the salvation of the soul. The author shows that in the last three decades of the 18th century, when more notice began to be paid to the phenomenon of suicide, discourse on the subject assumed a more psychological tone, with theologians and philosophers increasingly drawing attention to the harm done by certain religious and meditative techniques which in their view overexcited the imagination and could result in melancholy and despair. This shift might well be called the secularization of the discourse on suicide., Tomáš Malý., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy
The paper deals with the stories representing the suicide of Prague (German writing) authors, Christian Heinrich Spieß, Johann Friedrich Ernst Albrecht and Reactions to the Wertheriads, which document the divergent development of cutures of subjectivity (Reckwitz) in Central Europe in the age of Enlightenment. The first part of the paper reconstructs the influence of the radical preromantism and Sturm und Drang, namely The Sorrows of Young Werther in the Bohemian Lands. Next, It compares the Stories written by Spieß and Albrecht with Werther as a paradigmatic text and its model of Subjectivity. It focuses to the Story Die neue Sapfo written by Spieß in 1779, which documents the genesis of his later stories and the development of the conception of the role of the subject., Václav Smyčka., and Obsahuje bibliografické odkazy