Provider: MŠMT, LUC25097
Duration: September 2025– August 2028
Recipient: Institute of Art History, Czech Language Institute
Principal Investigator: Jan Dienstbier
Team at the Institute of Art History: Milada Studničková, Lenka Panušková, Kateřina Kubínová, Jan Klípa
Co-Investigator: Kateřina Voleková
Team at the Czech Language Institute: Andrea Hlaváčová Svobodová, Jitka Filipová
External Collaboration: Ágnes Korondi (Országos Széchényi Könyvtár, Budapest), Jan Hon (Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen-Nürnberg), Marie Theisen (Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Wien)
The project seeks to advance a more comprehensive understanding of late medieval Central European sources relating to prayer as a participatory activity. Although prayer was an omnipresent practice and an integral part of everyday devotional life, it has remained under-theorised in analytical terms, because it appears as something ordinary, familiar, and self-evident. Providing its deeper structural analysis, grounded in an interdisciplinary approach, therefore constitutes an important demand of contemporary medieval scholarship.
So far, Czech scholarship has devoted only limited attention to the study of late-medieval participatory prayer. Yet the Czech, and more broadly Central European, context is highly distinctive within the wider European framework and thus possesses considerable potential to play a significant role in the emerging prayer studies. This distinctiveness is reflected, for example, in the early adoption of vernacular languages in religious practice. A further challenge is posed by the complex religious landscape that emerged in the aftermath of the Hussite Wars, characterised by the effective coexistence of two ecclesiastical structures with partially divergent doctrines and practices. In many respects, this configuration anticipated developments that would only arise elsewhere in Europe after the Reformation.
The project aims to situate the phenomenon of late medieval prayer in the Czech Lands and Central Europe within new interpretative frameworks. It does so through the comprehensive study of written sources alongside material evidence, such as prayer books, altars and wall paintings, with particular emphasis on their visual aspects. In this respect, the project directly builds upon the activities of the working groups established within the international COST Action PRAYTICIPATE (CA23143, Participation through Prayer in the Late Medieval and Early Modern World https://www.cost.eu/actions/CA23143/; see also https://prayticipate.eu/).
Illustration: Prayerbook of Ladislaus the Posthumus, National Library of the Czech Republic, Teplá MS c. 87, fol. 93r. Reproduced with the kind permission of the National Library.
