In the late summer of 1713, plague appeared in the city of Prague. It was the first time in over thirty years that a full-scale epidemic had affected the city; yet, warning signs across the region ...had portended its coming, with earlier outbreaks in Vienna and parts of the Habsburg hereditary lands in March of that year. When the medical faculty of Prague's university convened to discuss whether there was cause for alarm and widescale action, its members could not help but observe that cases appeared to be multiplying most rapidly in the Jewish area of the city. The plague swiftly overtook the city and by the end ofJuly the Habsburg imperial authorities convened a special commission to coordinate the actions of the various sub-municipalities of Prague: the Old Town (within which the Jewish Town was housed), the New Town, and the "Little Side," which stood in the shadow of the looming imperial palace. Among the commission's principal tasks was the oversight of the city's Jews in the midst of the epidemic, including measures monitoring their movement, sealing off their neighborhood, and prohibiting their contact with the Christians of the city.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
Hrnčířské louky NM in the southeast of Prague protects a pond system surrounded by wet meadows. Until now, only sparse data about mollusc fauna were available. In 2021, 28 snail species (26 land ...snails, two aquatic) were recorded during the land snail inventory. Together with older sampling that also focused on aquatic species, 47 mollusc species are known from the reserve (28 land snails, 11 aquatic snails, and eight bivalves). Due to numerous water bodies, aquatic species dominate (40%), followed by hygrophilous and wetland dwellers (21%). These are supplemented by woodland species from sparse forest stands (17.5%) and ubiquists (15%). The last three species (6.5%) belong to open-ground dwellers. At the forefront of management activities in the last decades were mowing and declining fishery production in the ponds. An endangered and internationally protected species, Vertigo angustior, which depends on regular mowing, was recorded here for the first time. A review of aquatic molluscs following changes in pond management is recommended.
Lists represent a will to know,a desire to organize, to make sense, to possess and order information. The taming of information imagined by list-making is all the more important in moments of crisis ...and chaos. During one such moment, in the autumn of 1713, as plague ravaged the city of Prague and its Jewish ghetto, the offices of the Bohemian Chancery of the Habsburg Monarchy commissioned a list of Jewish welfare workers and appraised the salaries they received for providing relief for the beleaguered Prague Jews. This list names approximately seventy men and women who were devoted to plague response, and provides the salaries for some thirty-six more unnamed recruits working different tasks. It offers a window into how the Jewish community mobilized to face an epidemic, but also invites inquiry into cultures of record-keeping, and the relations between Jews and the state in the making of administrative knowledge. As a record of both contemporary events (the plague and its relief) and practices (list-making and record-keeping), a list such as this affords us an exciting vantage point for viewing intertwined attempts at social order and paper order.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, SIK, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
In 1577, a petty pawnbroker named Ester lost a clasp belonging to a Prague noblewoman, Lady Juliana the Fifth. Having been traded repeatedly between anonymous pawnbrokers, the clasp was eventually ...tracked down in the Polish city of Poznań, by which time Ester had already fled Prague and taken refuge in Cracow. In this essay, I use the subsequent criminal court case to explore this illuminating episode in the history of the city's Jewish Quarter. Taking place in the late Renaissance, during what has often been referred to as the Jewish “Golden Age,” I argue that this dramatic event provides access to the realities of an era often characterized as harmonious. I position pawnbroking as an industry that invited intimate and regular cross-confessional contact, and one that therefore offers up new opportunities to consider the nature of coexistence. By following the movement of both Ester and the pawned clasp from Prague to Poland, I also show how attention to pawnbroking can illuminate a constellation of transregional connections that stretched from Bohemia to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth to its east, revealing the otherwise unrecorded ways in which Prague's Jews were connected to the Ashkenazi diaspora.
This paper aims to describe Luigi Heilmann’s structural point of view. A philologist and linguist, a specialist in Indology, Semitistics, and Romance dialectology, he subscribed to the Prague School ...functional perspective and put his structural method in continuity with the comparative-historical method. Heilmann was open to scientific dialogue, also from an interdisciplinary perspective which he based on two principles: a generative humanitas and an interpretative structure.
The surface of building stone on historic buildings often bears the original traces of craftsmanship processing. These are an integral part of the visual appearance of the monument and thus its ...value, which needs to be protected. For studying and identifying traces and subsequent reconstruction of stonemason's tools, we use the methods of traceology and mechanoscopy. Using modern imaging techniques, we can identify the stonemason's tool used, reconstruct the shape of its blade, and determine how it was used. The obtained results can be used in the process of monument care, especially in the process of preparation and implementation of restoration interventions on the objects, but they are also useful for completing the historical context of the monument. Our research is focused on the systematic study of the surface topography of the stone monuments in Prague. The obtained results were systematically divided according to individual historical period. As a model example of the use of the above-mentioned methods and approaches, we present the topography of stone elements and the development of stonemason's craft in Gothic Prague. The development of the stonemason's craft within one city in a given period can be documented on selected examples arranged chronologically in succession.
A Leap into the Unknown Fabian Riesinger; Verena Hesse
Central Europe (Minneapolis, Minn.),
10/2019, Letnik:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
This article provides insights into the creation of a website analyzing the responses to the Prague Spring designed by the students of East European Studies at the Ludwig Maximilian University of ...Munich and the University of Regensburg. This collaborative project, entitled “Sprung ins Ungewisse: Der Prager Frühling im Spiegel der internationalen Presse” (A Leap into the Unknown: The Prague Spring as Reflected in the International Press), emphasizes the innovative nature of the Prague Spring and sheds light on international responses to it. This article provides an overview of the project and focuses in particular on three case studies from the website: Hungary, Italy, and the Czech exile press in the United States. It also charts the background and evolution of the project, the challenges and discoveries encountered by the students, and its international reception.
Based on all fictional texts, space takes place in different dimensions. When it comes to novels containing fantastical elements, they tend to put the perception of time and real life places into the ...background or completely change them. In fantastic narrative universe where dreams and reality are intertwined, the reader embarks on an unlimited journey between (real-unreal) spaces and (realunrealistic) times. Space also influences time by taking on different identities in every stage of the text. In novels with no fantastic elements, the author mostly prefers a direct narrative instead of giving the reader a surreal sense of time and place. Although these two approaches are different, space is indispensable for associating the novel’s characters with the place where the plot takes place. When space, which is a fundamental element in revealing meaning as a series of relations, is considered together with time, a variable and magical perception emerges in fantasy novels; however, in novels where reality is at the forefront, and there is an emphasis on event transfer, one does not go beyond a straight perception of time and space. In this context, the appearance of Prague in Nazlı Eray’s The City of Lost Shadows, who fictionalizes her works with fantastic elements in our literature, and the city’s identity in Philip Kerr’s detective novel Prague Fatale have been comparatively examined in terms of space. The themes of death and captivity arising from the gloomy history of the city, seen in both works, have been discussed in the context of temporal and spatial relations. Although the novels considered differ in perception and handling of the space, it has been observed that they meet in the themes of death and captivity in the axis of Prague.
•Odor identification and discrimination weakly predicted MoCA global cognitive status.•Weak olfactory influences on executive function irrespective of executive outcome.•One-point increase on odor ...test meant 1.09–1.29 greater odds of unimpaired MoCA.•Cognition is predicted by odor scores even in absence of age-related cognitive deficit.
Olfactory and cognitive performance share neural correlates profoundly affected by physiological aging. However, whether odor identification and discrimination scores predict global cognitive status and executive function in healthy older people with intact cognition is unclear. Therefore, in the present study, we set out to elucidate these links in a convenience sample of 204 independently living, cognitively intact healthy Czech adults aged 77.4 ± 8.7 (61–97 years) over two waves of data collection (one-year interval). We used the Czech versions of the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) to evaluate global cognition, and the Prague Stroop Test (PST), Trail Making Test (TMT), and several verbal fluency (VF) tests to assess executive function. As a subsidiary aim, we aimed to examine the contribution of olfactory performance towards achieving a MoCA score above vs. below the published cut-off value. We found that the MoCA scores exhibited moderate associations with both odor identification and discrimination. Furthermore, odor identification significantly predicted PST C and C/D scores. Odor discrimination significantly predicted PST C/D, TMT B/A, and standardized composite VF scores. Our findings demonstrate that olfaction, on the one hand, and global cognition and executive function, on the other, are related even in healthy older people.
Drawing on private and public sources surrounding Countess Elise von Schlik (1792–1855) and František Palacký (1798–1876), this article explores music-cultural connections between the nobility and ...intellectually engaged middle class in Prague during the 1830s and 1840s. A consideration of them both together in one study sheds light on cross-societal links in the private sphere that helped to link two seemingly separate parts of the population in ways that might not be quite so visible in other areas of everyday life during that time. Furthermore, an exploration of Palacký’s and Schlik’s encounters (and non-encounters) through the lens of music brings to light new facets of Prague’s (private) cultural life. A reconsideration of analytical binarities often found in historiographical writing—for instance, aristocratic/noble vs. middle-class circles, private vs. public musical life, amateurism vs. professionalism, and male vs. female cultural agency—can lead to a more nuanced understanding of musical history both in the Czech lands and further afield.
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