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Jan Odstrčilík
The project aims to produce a critical edition and comparative digital analysis of the Latin translation of the Czech Sunday Postil by Jan Hus. This represents a unique testimony to the public impact of the Bohemian reformer. Hus originally wrote his collection of sermons in Czech in order to give lay people access to biblical interpretation and moral instruction. However, by translating it into Latin, the postil was integrated into the scholarly context of the European Middle Ages and made accessible to a wider audience beyond Bohemia. The translation illustrates how closely vernacular piety and Latin scholarly culture were intertwined. At the same time, it provides insights into the spread of Reformation ideas before the Reformation and documents the linguistic and theological adaptation of Hus's sermons. The Latin version thus forms an important interface between Czech religious culture and the European discourse of the early 15th century
Jan Odstrčilík
The Latin-Czech Sermon Collection by utraquist preacher Michal Polák is a unique witness to the vibrant intersection of languages, cultures, and religious thought in late medieval Central Europe. Composed of sermons written down in a mixture of Latin and Czech—the collection displays Polák’s mastery of multilingual preaching as well as his effort to make theological and moral teaching accessible beyond a single linguistic community.
This project aims at the analysis of the language use in the collection as well as its contextualisation withing the production of multilingual sermones of the given time in the Latin Europe. The study will cover the historical milieu, linguistic characteristics, and Polák’s rhetorical strategies. Readers will gain insight not only into the content of the sermons themselves but also into how preaching circulates across linguistic boundaries, adapts to different audiences, and shapes religious identity. By moving the multilingual sermons into the focus, the analysis will be carried out using digital humanities tools, taking the opportunity of multilingual material to develop appropriate digital tools to analyse and visualise the results.
Odstrčilík, Jan, ‘The Multilingual Latin-Czech sermon collection De sanctis by Michael Polonus (†1480)’, in MEDIEVAL MULTILINGUAL MANUSCRIPTS: TEXTS, SCRIBES, AND PATRONS. Proceedings of the online conference held at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 17–28 May, 2021, ed. byNike Stam (Dublin: Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, School of Celtic Studies, forthcoming)
