During the Thirty Years War the life of the inhabitants of Central Bohemian Town Slaný was (like the life in other central European towns in this period) mainly influenced by soldiers and various war events. Nevertheless, many changes in their lives were brought by the pawn and subsequent sale of the town to nobleman Jaroslav Bořita z Martinic. This thesis is mainly focused on the municipal administration, especially on war events impacts on the town government and also on the new elements in municipal administration related to the change of its legal status, respectively on encroachment of the new manorial lords on the municipal administration. It also deals with mechanisms used by municipal officials (authorities) to protect the lives and property of town's inhabitant against the rampage soldiery. It is not omitted the interactions occurred between the townspeople and soldiers including self-preserving mechanisms and adaptation strategies that allow them cope with soldiers presence as well.

Keywords: ars moriendi, castrum doloris, early modern period, epitaphs, funeral essentials, funeral procession, funeral sermons, Prague, sepulcher essentials, tomb stones The thesis introduces a specific part of the cultural history of the early modern period - the funeral culture. Considering the extensiveness of thematter, the scope has been limited to the area of Prague, to the cultural sphere of secular nobility and to the time period between the years 1500 and 1700. Naturally, the timeframe is not and cannot be absolute given the nature of this subject matter, which is culture. In the introductory chapter, the paper seeks to clarify eschatology and religious conditions in the early modern period, depicting death and its grip in the 16th and 17th centuries. Each chapter is devoted to a specific phenomenon of the funeral culture, in the same order in which the succession should logically follow shortly before and after the death of an important person. As such, the thesis specifically discusses the doctrine of "good death" - so called ars moriendi, exhibitions of the body, the funeral procession, construction of the Castrum Doloris, funeral sermons, and provision of funeral monuments. At the conclusion, the thesis ventures into the geographically and religiously distant Duchy of Finland, which...

Ce travail de thèse a pour objet l’historicité conflictuelle d’un objet qui n’a jamais vraiment été étudié d’un point de vue littéraire : la littérature hagiographique de l’époque moderne. En nous séparant de la lecture institutionnelle qui est souvent celle de la critique, nous voulons la dégager de son utilisation comme moyen de contextualisations historiques ou anthropologiques. Au sein des écrits de la période moderne, l’hagiographie n’est pas simplement l’ « autre discours » de l’historiographie, comme le disait Michel de Certeau. Au lendemain du concile de Trente, les biographies d’une candidate à la sainteté comme Jeanne de Chantal (1572-1641, canonisée en 1767) sont l’occasion de réfléchir sur ces nouveaux écrits, qui présentent des structures qui se stabilisent et des éléments topiques qui renvoient à une tradition d’écriture préexistante. Qui sont les auteurs de ces textes ? Dans quelles conditions les rédigent-ils et pour quel public ? Quels en sont les enjeux ? En pleine crise moderniste, la condamnation par la Congrégation de l’Index de la dernière Vie importante de la figure, la Sainte Chantal de Bremond (1912), sera notre point de vue : Bremond revendique paradoxalement une forme de nouveauté par un retour au XVIIe siècle, visible dans la filiation exhibée de son propre texte à celui de la première biographie, les Mémoires de Françoise-Madeleine de Chaugy (1642). Ce geste construit alors, comme malgré lui, une histoire diachronique des Vies de Jeanne de Chantal, dont les mutations en font un « cas » de la littérature hagiographique française et permettent de voir qu’écrire la Vie d’un saint, c'est à chaque fois rejouer ce qu’est la sainteté. / The hagiographic literature from the Early Modern Period has never been studied as a plain literary issue. Departing from the institutional reading of a major part of the critics about hagiography, the hagiographic literature must be considered apart from its historical and anthropological contextualisations. Hagiography is not only the “other one” of historiography, as Michel de Certeau said. In the wake of the Trent Council, the biographies of a candidate to sanctity like Jeanne de Chantal (1572-1641, canonized in 1767) allow us to consider these new writings which show newly built structures and topical elements of a former writing tradition. Who wrote these texts? How have there been written? For whom? What were there main issues? Our point of view will be the last major Life of Jeanne de Chantal (1912), convicted by the Congregation of the Index, in the middle of the Modernist Crisis. The return to the first biography of the heroine, the Mémoires of Françoise-Madeleine de Chaugy (1642), is a paradoxical way for Bremond to claim the originality of his approach. A diachronic history of Jeanne de Chantal’s Lives can be seen through this operation. Their mutations make them a “case” of French hagiographical Literature: writing the Life of a saint is always defining what is sanctity again.

Der Gegenstand dieser Arbeit sind die physischen, bibliographischen und infrastrukturellen Dimensionen skandinavischer Buchdruckkultur im Spannungsfeld zwischen Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit, Scholastik und Humanismus, spätem Katholizismus und früher Reformation. Ihr theoretischer Ausgangspunkt ist die Erkenntnis, dass die vorreformatorische skandinavische Buchkultur nur im Zusammenhang und Wechselspiel mit der gleichzeitigen kontinentaleuropäischen Buchkultur verstanden werden kann. Der von Deutschland ausstrahlende Vertrieb von gedruckten Büchern erweiterte sich im Gefolge der Preiskrise der 1480er und dem Ausbau Export-orientierter kontinentaler Buchdruckzentren zu einem fest etablierten, zuverlässigen Buchhandel europäischen Ausmasses. Er stellte für skandinavische Drucker eine grosse Herausforderung dar, der sie erst nach 1525 mehr und mehr gewachsen zeigten. Auch wenn die (selbstverständlich nur ungenau zu schätzende) Zahl der gedruckten Bücher, die vor der Reformation in Skandinavien vorhanden waren, an sich klein war, stützt die weit höhere Zahl der Provenienzen eindeutig die Erkenntnis, dass wir es mit einer wesentlich grösseren Buchkultur zu tun haben als bislang angenommen. Die skandinavische vorreformatorische Buchkultur unterschied sich dabei grundsätzlich nicht von der zeitgenössischen kontinentalen oder westeuropäischen Buchkultur. Gegenüber der dynamischen zeitgenössischen kontinentalen Buchzentren entwickelte sich Skandinavien zwar langsamer, ebenso wie Auswirkungen der geographisch periphen Lage nicht ausser Acht gelassen werden dürfen. Gleichzeitig aber war es in vielerlei Hinsicht fest im Gefüge der Netzwerke des kirchlichen, akademischen, intellektuellen und buchhändlerischen Europas verankert. / The subject of this thesis are the infrastructural, bibliographical and physical dimensions of Scandinavian print culture between the contradictory contexts of the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, scholasticism and humanism, late Catholicism and the dawn of the Reformation. Its theoretical point of point of origin is the awareness of the importance of the connection and interplay of Scandinavian pre-Reformation book culture with its contemporary continental counterpart for a deeper understanding of its characteristics and development. The trade with printed books emanating from Germany expanded to a reliable, well-established trade of European dimensions. While being a challenge for Scandinavian printing, which they met successfully not before after 1525, for readers it meant an opportunity. Although the number of printed books available in Scandinavia before the Reformation was not large, the large number of provenances identified and presented in this thesis supports the assumption that this print culture was much larger than assumed up to now. The nature of the Scandinavian pre-Reformation print culture didn’t essentially differ from its continental or Western European siblings. In comparison, Scandinavia did evolve slower and we mustn’t disregard the effects of a position in the geographical periphery. But, at the same time, was Scandinavia firmly positioned in European ecclesiastical, academical, intellectual and book trade networks.

Cette étude aborde la conception de l'espace tunisien depuis l'Occident au croisement des notions territoriales Africa et Tunis, à travers la représentation cartographique à l'époque moderne du XVIe siècle au XVIIIe siècle, d'après des sources issues principalement des collections de la Bibliothèque nationale de France. Cette étude a pour ambition de proposer un travail d'investigation de l'image cartographique de l'espace tunisien en privilégiant deux approches : une approche structurale historiographique et une approche quantitative. L'objectif principal de la présente étude est de détecter les grandes phases historiques dans la représentation de l'espace tunisien, à partir d'un corpus assez dense. Je propose d'individualiser trois groupes d'images cartographiques caractérisées par des déformations similaires, qui me paraissent correspondre à des étapes importantes de l'évolution cartographique moderne ou encore à de grandes ruptures dans sa construction. Ces étapes correspondent à chaque fois à de nouveaux récits de voyages et par la suite à une évolution du regard. L'ensemble des cartes est représentatif non pas de l'édition cartographique mais de l'évolution des techniques et des connaissances géographiques. Les « cartes-modèles » ou encore les « cartes-mères » que j'identifie dans un premier temps, sont ensuite l'objet d'une expérimentation à partir de méthodes quantitatives. Cette approche, qui porte sur les déformations des surfaces, vise à une comparaison entre deux surfaces : une surface-source supposée « exacte » et une surface-image correspondant aux exemples historiques analysés. / This study deals with the concept of the Tunisian space, seen from the West as an intersection of the territorial concepts of Africa and Tunis, throughout the cartographical representation of the modern period, from the 16th to the 18th century. The study is essentially based on cartographic material from the collections of the French National Library. This thesis aims to investigate the cartographic representation of the Tunisian space through two main approaches: the first one is historiographical and structural at heart while the second is quantitative. The main objective of this present study is to detect the essential historical steps in the cartographic representation, from wide sources. So far, I suggest identifying three groups of cartographic images, which are characterized by similar deformations. These images correspond with important stages of the modern cartographical image or even major breaks in its construction, connected with new travel accounts and an evolving representation. Ali maps are not only representative of the cartographical edition but also of the development of technology and geographical knowledge. The « model-maps » along with « mother­maps », once identified, are subsequently subjected to experiments, through a quantitative approach. This approach, which centers on surfaces deformations, is meant to establish a comparison between two types of surfaces: one, the source-surface, which is presumed to be accurate and the other, the image-surface, which corresponds with the historical examples we consider.

Building on recent scholarship in the history of art which has started to reappraise the meaning of grotesque and scatological motifs, this thesis examines how digestion was conceived of as a model of creation, and how this was translated visually. Renaissance creativity was increasingly modelled on a series of natural processes like digestion, following a trend in favour of Aristotelian psychology. However, it has been largely overlooked in comparison to the bleeding, the pneumatic, and especially the procreative natural models, which have been extensively studied. The central argument of this thesis is that digestion constituted an alternative-albeit less 'decorous'-model of creation, denoting the intervention of a more 'earthbound' ingenium. I argue that this model was used by certain classes of artists as an acknowledgement of a strong engagement with materials and of the labour of a round-the-clock imagination. Goldsmithing and printmaking are artistic professions whereby the artistic process was often considered as an act of 'soiling' oneself, both in the sense of the body and the phantasia. This thesis focuses on a period spanning c. 1530 to 1675, from Rabelais' works to the facetious printer Jacques Lagniet. It mines a corpus of little-studied textual and visual sources from the north of the Alps, examining a continuity between France and the German lands: geographical areas which both had an especially pronounced 'culture of excretion'. From a broader perspective, this research responds to a widespread scholarly call for more attention to the organic soul and the lower body, nuancing the alleged hegemony of the brain and the higher senses throughout history. It seeks to modify the perception of early modern artists and viewers as cerebral intellectuals, presenting them as individuals who also 'thought with their guts'.

This study examines landscape change in the Province of Jämtland during c. 1000–1750 AD. Settlement and arable cultivation are two of the most important sources in this study. They are therefore treated in depth, particularly farmsteads that were deserted during the late medieval agrarian crisis, so-called ödesbölen, and their fossil field-traces. The dissertation contains four major investigations. In the first investigation 610 possible ödesbölen were identified. The desertion was estimated at 50 per cent. The second investigation had its focus on the geographic location, and the conclusion was that the ödesbölen may have been deserted when the climate turned colder in the 14th century. The third investigation concerned medieval agriculture. Using historical maps and detailed mapping of fossil field traces it was established that the annually cultivated acreage decreased from the High Middle Ages until early modern times. This probably means that the agrarian crisis caused a change in the agrarian regime, from predominant arable farming to predominant stock-raising. The fourth investigation was whether the ownership or the use of the ödesbölen created obstacles to recolonization when the crisis subsided. This turned out not to be so in the case of ownership, but may have been so with regard to communal forest grazing. According to historical maps the ödesbölen in Jämtland were finally recolonized about 200 years later than for example in southern Sweden. The reasons probably were wars and a worse climate. The dissertation is capped off with both a model and a description of landscape change in Jämtland. Characteristic for the development of the landscape has been fluctuations in settlement. The ödesbölen are part of a pattern in which they are colonized, deserted, recolonized and again deserted in a cyclical course of events. The openness of the landscape is not part of this course of events.

This study explores the Swedish portrayals of Russians as compared to Danes and Polesand how they changed over time during the Great Northern War and Russo-SwedishWar (1741–1743). Through the Swedish state-run Posttidningar, the information deliveredby the state indicates that the circumstances of war and the power of the enemy leaderswere more significant than specific attributes of the enemy other in forming collectiveSwedish identity. Creating these collective sentiments was an essential tool for the stateto affirm the cooperation of its population during times of war. The information aboutthe enemy affects the transformation of a semi-public sphere in Sweden by providing acommon knowledge base to discuss and understand a changing view of its place inEurope. By depicting the enemy in flexible terms, the Swedish state desires its populationto cooperate based on the threat of war, common knowledge, and Sweden’s place inEurope, rather than solidarity against a static religious or political other.

Jan Lhoták Borough landed estate of Sušice. From borough villages to abolition of corvee and its results (abstract) The aim of this doctoral thesis lies in its contribution to a complex problem of economic development of Czech landowning towns in the post-White Mountain period. The research is focused on a selected problem of town feudalisation, i. e. analysis of the importance as well as extent of their seignorial activities. Czech historiography has dealt with such a topic rather marginally, because towns used to be understood as a strange element in feudal environment, which on the contrary created conditions for social modernisation. Aristocratic (chamber) or church landed estates used to be studied as a matter of priority. Introductory chapter balances current research on the topic of borough landed estates. General survey of the research in Western Europe is presented first. Seignorial ambitions of towns are part and parcel of a vast outlined study of mutual relation between the town and the country. The topic has already been applicated in archaeology and medievistics. For the Early Modern period the research has been fragmented between agrarian and urban history, the methods of which approach the topic with various results (above all the work of Adolf Zeman about Pilsen and Rokycany in the 18th...

Tereza Kolmačková Votive offerings at selected Catholic pilgrimage sites: Theoretical reflection and anlysis of extant examples Abstract The aim of my thesis is to analyse votive offerings at Catholic Marian pilgrimage sites mainly from the early modern period. Firstly I discuss Marian images at pilgrimage sites to show who were the votive offering brought to and to describe a broader context of their placement. The thesis is then focused on analysis of textual evidence from the 17th century relating to the Czech pilgrimage site Svatá Hora and of extant objects mainly from Bavaria. Based on these sources the most common types of votive offerings seem to be painted pictures, models of body parts, statues and figures, candles and jewelry, other objects, however, occur as well. The votive offerings were mostly donated to express gratitude for a miracle. Therefore, the miracle process is also shortly discussed in my thesis. Votive offerings did not, however, only show the gratitude of a devotee but it seems that their promise was needed for Virgin Mary to perform a miracle. My analysis suggests that very important aspects of votive offerings were their performative character and the power to create and maintain relationships with Virgin Mary and other pilgrims.