OTKA Saints Colloquia Series: Public lecture by Kateřina Horníčková

The Department of Medieval Studies of CEU, CULTSYMBOLS and OTKA Saints Projects

cordially invite you to the public lecture of the OTKA Saints Colloquia Series by

Kateřina Horníčková

(Institut für Realienkunde, Universität Salzburg/Krems)

on

Martyrs of “Our” Faith:

Community Identities and the Cult of the Bohemian Martyrs

in Post-Hussite Bohemia

                                        at 17:30 p.m. on Tuesday, September 24, 2013

                                        Faculty Tower, Room 409

                                        CEU, Nádor u. 9, Budapest

Hagiography typically works within a conceptual framework set by (and for) either Catholic or Reformation perspectives. The representations of the Bohemian saints in the 15th and 16th centuries and of the martyrs of the Bohemian Reformation as well as other expressions of their cult in the Bohemian Utraquism pose therefore an interesting challenge to the traditional concepts in cultural history. Focusing on images and feasts of saints in the “historical anomaly” of the Bohemian proto-Reformation context (F. Šmahel), this paper discusses their function in the context of the Utraquists’ attempt to construct independent religious identity.

Kateřina Horníčková, PhD. (CEU), is research fellow in the ESF-EuroCORECODE Project Symbols that Bind and Break Communities: Saints’ Cults as Stimuli and Expressions of Local, Regional, National and Universalist Identities, as a member of its Austrian subproject The Visual Representation of Saints – Closeness, Distance, Identification and Identity, Twelfth-Sixteenth Centuries. Her research interests cover visual culture of medieval and early modern Central Europe, with a particular focus on the sign language of religious art. She lectures at the University of Southern Bohemia, and participates in the project J. A. Comenius as a Site of Memory at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences.