Leseprobe

169 Hus images have been preserved in the form of book illus- trations, prints and manuscript illumination, as these media had a better chance of escaping the eyes of the censors in the post-White Mountain period.11 Like the images of Hus, the central symbol of the Utraquists, the chalice, was also removed. In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this sign not only identified churches as Utraquist (e.g. the Church of Our Lady before Týn in Prague’s Old Town, the Corpus Christi Chapel in Prague’s New Town or the Church of St Barbara in Kutná Hora), it had also been adopted as a symbol by Utraquist towns, where representations of a chalice were placed on their gates (Kutná Hora, Hradec Králové / Königgrätz and Mladá Boleslav / Jungbunzlau) or were incorporated into their municipal coat of arms.12 The ‘purging’ of the Church of Our Lady before Týn in Prague in the period after the Battle of White Moun- tain is documented in particular detail: the chalice and the sculpture of the Utraquist King George of Poděbrady ( Jiří z Poděbrad) were removed from the façade and replaced by a gilded relief depicting St Mary of the Assumption (fig. 1). The bones of representatives of the Utraquist church buried there were disinterred and their tombs destroyed.An extraor- dinarily strong symbolic demonstration of distancing from the non-Catholic past was the production of new liturgical objects, such as chalices and monstrances, out of older litur- gical equipment—this happened, for example, in Polná (Polna), Slaný (Schlan) and Chrudim (fig. 2).13 In the latter location, a monstrance was made in the form of a Gothic tower, whose strongly historicising features served as a visual reference to Catholicism as the traditional and original faith of Bohemia, dating back to pre-Reformation times. Transforming the confessional topography The Catholic reform in the second quarter of the seven- teenth century not only brought about fundamental changes in cultural and religious life, but also influenced the appear- ance and confessional topography of the towns and cities. The foundations of this change were already laid around 1600, when Catholic patrons—rulers, nobility and clergy— directed their activities towards establishing ‘Catholic’ places of remembrance in the towns and in the countryside, which were to serve as focal points for the renewal of the faith. In terms of confessional topography, this meant, on the one hand, strengthening traditional places of remembrance that had been in Catholic hands since the Middle Ages. On the other, it meant appropriating new places, as well as cultivat- ing sites that had potential for a renewal of Catholic piety and over which the Catholics had lost control in post-­ Hussite times.The greatest potential among these loculi were the pilgrimage sites, the number of which increased as a result of new foundations on Catholic estates.The first foun- dations and endowments were established in pilgrimage centres under Jesuit administration such as Bohosudov (Mariaschein), Stará Boleslav (Altbunzlau) and the Holy Mountain at Příbram, as well as in the renovated monastery churches in Prague (Premonstratensians on Strahov hill, Franciscans at the Basilica of St James, Augustinians at St Thomas’s Church) and in locations ‘with tradition’ (Vyšehrad). According to Joseph L. Koerner, clashes between the con- fessions in the Prague Towns were a symbolic confessional conflict (with images as ‘contested territory’, borrowing a term from Joseph L.Koerner), which created the conditions for the future cultural hegemony of the Catholic camp.14 Whereas in the pre-White Mountain era the aim was to create a network of Catholic bridgeheads in a non-­ Catholic environment, the situation changed fundamentally in the period after 1620. The confessional topography of all the Prague Towns underwent a particularly thorough trans- formation through the arrival of nineteen new religious orders and the renovation of older monasteries and con- vents.15 In Hradčany, in addition to the Capuchins who had been there since the late sixteenth century, the Barnabites (St Benedict) and the Ursulines (St John of Nepomuk) became established. In the Lesser Town the Discalced Carmelite Friars (Church of Our Lady Victorious), the Jesuits (St Nicholas), the Discalced Carmelite Nuns (St Joseph) and the Dominicans (St Mary Magdalene) founded their religious houses. In the Old Town of Prague new monasteries of the Carmelites of the Ancient Observance (St Gallus), the Brothers Hospitallers (Sts Simon and Jude), the Benedic- tines (St Nicholas), the Servites (St Michael), the Paulans (Holy Saviour) and the Crusaders of the Red Heart (Holy Cross) were built. Religious houses of the Franciscans (St Mary of the Snows, as early as 1604), Jesuits (Corpus Christi Chapel, later St Ignatius), Discalced Augustinians (St Wenceslas), Hibernians (St Mary), Capuchins (St Joseph), Ursulines (St Ursula), Augustinians (St Catherine) and Trinitarians (Holy Trinity) were founded in the New Town of Prague. Two models for the settlement of new religious orders in Prague can be observed: either they were able to take over an existing church and gradually expand in the