Domestic project

Manuscript Practices and the Textuality of Exile Communities from the Czech Lands in the 1620s and 1630s

Provider: The Czech Science Foundation
| Project duration: 2025–2027
| Project ID: GA25-15529S

The project will examine manuscript practices and the circulation of manuscripts in the context of establishing non-Catholic Czech and Moravian communities in exile centres in Poland, Germany, Silesia and Hungary between 1621 and 1639. In the conditions of advancing dispersion, manuscripts grew in importance as the primary connective tissue of exile diaspora. The project will focus on two aspects of textual practices applied by exiles during this period: an investigation of dominant themes and ideological topoi (from expressions of panic and fear in texts from the 1620s to the manifestation of efforts to strengthen the identity of the exile community in texts from the 1630s); and an analysis of the agenda associated with the texts, which included an extensive agenda of manuscript copies, which formed a part of intense and deliberate effort to stabilize the dispersed community and its memory. Project results will be presented in a scholarly monograph and in a series of studies, published in respected international journals in delayed Open Access.

Investigator

Tomáš Havelka
Mgr., Ph.D.

Coinvestigator

Jiří Just
Mgr., Th.D.

Beneficiary

Institute of Philosophy, Czech Academy of Sciences

Cobeneficiary

Institute of History, Czech Academy of Sciences