This volume presents an edition of charters issued between 1436 and 1620 for a number of Bohemian and Moravian manorial towns, in which their issuers sought to guarantee the future development of religious conditions in a given locality. In the case of the earliest documents from the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, these were predominantly charters issued by Catholic authorities (including the rulers Sigismund of Luxembourg and Albert of Habsburg), who guaranteed the free practice of communion under both kinds in localities that had adopted Utraquism.
In the course of the sixteenth century, however, Utraquist and later Evangelical lords and knights came to dominate among the issuers; in their lordly towns and market towns they sought to secure the future exercise of their preferred confession. From the 1580s onward, charters issued by Catholic lords also appear, whereby, in an effort to ensure the continuity of Catholicism, they transferred patronage rights over parish churches in their towns or across entire estates to agents of the Counter-Reformation (in Moravia to the bishop of Olomouc, in Bohemia to the superiors of Jesuit houses).
It was precisely in the period of intensifying interconfessional tensions between 1580 and 1620 that two-thirds of the documents under study were issued, demonstrating that both sides sought to use them to consolidate their positions in the two lands of the Crown.
The volume makes available 75 charters in full (in extenso), supplemented by regests and critical apparatus. It includes an introductory study, whose first part presents the entire corpus of sources. The second part situates them within the broader context of noble documentary production at the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period, addressing both their contemporary preservation and their transmission to the present (originals, confirmations, vidimuses, land-register entries, and unverified copies). The introduction also sets out the editorial principles. The volume further includes indices (of persons and places) and a list of sources and bibliography.
Editor:
Josef Hrdlička
Publisher: Filosofia
Series: Archiv český 44
Language: Czech
Place: Praha
Year: 2025
Pages: 506
ISBN: 978-80-7007-748-1
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