Historia Persecutionum Ecclesiae Bohemicae between History, Identity and Martyrology

0578187 - FLÚ 2024 RIV DE eng J - Journal Article
Urbánek, Vladimír
Historia Persecutionum Ecclesiae Bohemicae between History, Identity and Martyrology.
Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History. Roč. 114, č. 1 (2023), s. 265-289. ISSN 0003-9381. E-ISSN 2198-0489
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GA20-11795S
Institutional support: RVO:67985955
Keywords : early modern historiography * ecclesiastical history * confessional identity * collective memory * martyrology * Bohemian Brethren * Jan Amos Comenius
OECD category: Philosophy, History and Philosophy of science and technology
Impact factor: 0.3, year: 2022
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://doi.org/10.14315/arg-2023-1140111

This paper discusses, from three different angles, one of the historical works produced by Jan Amos Comenius and other authors from the Unity of Brethren, the Historia Persecutionum Ecclesiae Bohemicae (1647, 1648). Firstly, it deals with it as a work of ecclesiastical history with a focus on how it was conceived as a survey of major changes in the Bohemian church. Secondly, it discusses the text of the Historia as an expression of a specific Brethren confessional identity and collective memory. It shows how this work uses labels for different non-Catholic religious groups in Bohemia and how these categories can be interpreted as elements of a specific discourse of collective identity. Thirdly, the paper focuses on the Historia in the context of the period’s Protestant martyrologies and especially discusses its relationship with the seventh edition of John Foxe’s Actes and Monuments (1631/1632). These three analytical approaches have enabled not only the specification of the multiple functions of the Historia Persecutionum Ecclesiae Bohemicae as a historiographic text but also an assessment of the textual strategies its authors used to navigate their text between the genres of history and martyrology and to express the complex issue of the confessional identity of the exiled minority religious group in the circumstances of the Thirty Years’ War. The results of this analysis contribute to the growing body of specialized literature on early modern practices in historical writing, more specifically on the historical discourses produced by confessional historiography.
Permanent Link: https://hdl.handle.net/11104/0347363