Historical Scholarship, Politics, and Identity in Bohemia, c.1650-1690
This thesis examines the interplay between historical scholarship and politics in the Bohemian composite monarchy in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648). During the turbulent events of the first half of the seventeenth century, Bohemia underwent major political, religious, and socio-economic changes. With the reestablishment of peace, the polity experienced a flourishing of historical scholarship which aimed to come to terms with the ruptures of the prolonged military conflict, to redefine a Bohemian identity and the Bohemian polity in its aftermath, and to legitimate a vision of Catholic Bohemia. Adopting the perspective of three leading scholars in the Bohemian historical essor, Bohuslav Balbín (1621-1688), Jiří Kruger (1608-1671), and Tomáš Pešina z Čechorodu (1629-1680), this thesis considers the political role of scholarship in the composite monarchy at this time. The first half of the thesis examines the ways in which they practiced historical scholarship, their scholarly methodologies, and their practices of knowledge. Assessing the ways in which Balbín, Kruger, and Pešina negotiated their places within the wider world of European scholarship and their choices to accept, adapt, or ignore various methodologies, I argue that they successfully created a reputation for scholarly probity and authority which gave political weight to their arguments about the history of the polity. Their efforts to create an updated and Catholic historical account of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia which improved upon their predecessors, coupled with their realistic assessments of the epistemic and political limitations of their works, rendered their historical scholarship credible. Bohemia’s post-Westphalian historians thus authoritatively contributed to the intellectual Recatholicisation of the polity, which was represented as traditionally Catholic. As Catholics and members of a recatholicising intellectual elite, Balbín, Kruger, and Pešina were invested in the establishment of the Habsburg regime in Bohemia. However, they were also critical of the political establishment and of aspects of the Recatholicisation, and their historical works and manuscripts intervened in political debates on behalf of the rights of the Catholic Church in Bohemia. I argue that their works advanced differing but interconnected visions of a traditional Bohemian identity based around language, the nobility, and Catholicism, and that these identities were articulated against the increasingly cosmopolitan Habsburg nobility and the post-Tridentine Roman Church.
Bohemia, Early Modern Europe, Historiography, Jesuits, Recatholicisation, History of Scholarship
Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations