Česká knižní kultura doby Václava Hájka z Libočan. Na okraj jednoho badatelského vakua
Czech book culture at the time of Václav Hájek of Libočany. At the brink of a research vacuum

Summary/Abstract: This paper attempts to examine the literary terrain marked out between the end of the 15th century and the year 1553, i.e. the period in which the first true Czech author, Václav Hájek of Libočany, author of the Czech Chronicle (1541), translator and adaptor of several Old Czech works, lived and worked. However, for this it was necessary both to confront some of the basically Marxist views held by mid-20th researchers and to try to incorporate the well-known facts into a higher entity called book culture. One of the period-based dangers of Marxist paleo-Czech studies was the evaluation of literary works on their own or without any interest in the specific nature of the communication process or the artistic and workmanlike aspects of publication, distribution and reading technique. One of the parameters of book culture is the readers' reception of texts, which enables a readership community to be formed and cultivated. Book printing in Bohemia and Moravia played a much smaller role in this process than we have previously presumed, as the foremost church institutions, Prague University representatives and thus the printers themselves did not understand the social impact of book printing and at most thought of it as another form of business. The literary scene was so lacking in writers, translators and potential readers, who were mostly just from the increasingly emancipated middle classes, that books of such typographic standards were not produced in enough numbers to support the habit of quiet reading and thus enable intensive reading to slowly turn into extensive reading. Domestic book printing was greatly affected by the import of books from Germany and the strong scriptographic output of the intelligentsia there.

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