How to Tell the Story of a Crisis? Three Historiographic Accounts of the Estates Revolt and the Bohemian War

0568248 - FLÚ 2023 RIV CZ eng J - Journal Article
Malura, Jan
How to Tell the Story of a Crisis? Three Historiographic Accounts of the Estates Revolt and the Bohemian War.
Acta Comeniana. -, 35/59 (2021), s. 35-68. ISSN 0231-5955
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GA20-11795S
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : Early Modern historiography * narrative techniques * poetics of historiographic texts * the Bohemian War * Mikuláš Dačický z Heslova * Pavel Skála ze Zhoře * Jindřich Hýzrle z Chodů
OECD category: History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)
Method of publishing: Metadata only
https://filosofia.flu.cas.cz/upload/__files/AC35_obsah.pdf

This study investigates the narrative techniques and poetics of historiographic texts from the 16th and 17th centuries. It analyses how historiographic narratives represent crises and calamities, focusing specifically on the Estate’s Revolt and the Bohemian (or Bohemian and Palatinate) War (1617–1624). It shows how the narrative selects elements from historical happenings, uses live-action descriptions, inserts narrative commentaries, and draws on the authority of eyewitness accounts. The analysis focuses on three works: Paměti (Memoirs) by Mikuláš Dačický z Heslova, Historie církevní (History of the Church) by Pavel Skála ze Zhoře, and the German-language autobiography Raiszbuch und Leben by Jindřich Hýzrle z Chodů. Among the features shared by all the investigated texts is that the individual stories are presented as empirically rich narratives focusing mainly on specific events. The writings neither make substantial use of universal narratives nor combine stories to create integrated narrative configurations, and only occasionally do they engage in theological and political speculations regarding the changing world and crises. For historians of that time, the authority of eyewitnesses was a crucial principle in narrative practice, this was reflected not only in the authors’ attempts to present their own experience, having been direct observers of the narrated events but also in their tendency to excerpt and reword narratives from other sources, especially news leaflets, whose representations of events contained a wealth of specific information and descriptive details.

Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0340218