Abstract » Urbánek
Prague 2009
Apocalypticism, Millenarianism, and Prophecy: Eschatological Expectations between East-Central and Western Europe, 1560-1670
Vladimír URBÁNEK
The Reception of Alsted’s Eschatology among Bohemian Exiles: Partlicius, Skála and Comenius
This paper focuses on reception of eschatological and millenarian schemes, especially of the scholarly provenance, within the circles of Bohemian and Moravian Protestant exiles at the beginning of the Thirty Years‘ War. The first part will summarize the main theses of my recently published Czech monograph. Following the works of Nicolette Mout and especially Howard Hotson’s book on Alsted’s millenarianism, I have analyzed the works of several representatives of the Bohemian and Moravian emigrés and tried to show how they derived their concepts from three main traditions and discourses: that of Melanchthonian eschatology, with its conception of fatal periods, secondly, that of astrological history with its theory of great conjunctions and, last but not least, that of the Rosicrucian manifestos with their prediction of general reformation. I have investigated how these works used eschatological and millenarian schemes within scholarly discourse and within the genre of political propaganda.
In the second part, I will discuss three peculiar cases of the exiles from the Lands of the Bohemian Crown whose works prove the shift from broadly eschatological concepts of history and chronology to the schemes derived from the learned millenarianism, most notably from the works of the leading Calvinist theologian Johann Heinrich Alsted, in the second half of the 1620s. The first one is a less known humanist, astronomer and physician Simeon Partlicius (ca 1590-after 1640) whose highly eclectic works combined several intellectual traditions mentioned above and earlier Bohemian schemes of eschatological chronology (derived, for example, from the work of Václav Budovec of Budov). In his Metamorphosis mundi (1626) Partlicius copied several important passages from Alsted’s Thesaurus chronologiae (1624) including his famous calculation of the beginning of millennium. The second exiled intellectual is a well known historian Pavel Skála of Zhoř (ca 1583-ca 1640), one of canonical figures of standard Czech histories of literature and historiography, whose vernacular manuscript Historie církevní (Church History) belongs to the most important primary sources of the turbulent years of the early seventeenth century including the Bohemian Revolt and its aftermath. I show that the modern reading and selective editing of his opus magnum distorted to a certain extent our ability to understand its eschatological background. This eschatological framework will be documented mainly from another of Skála’s unpublished manuscripts, Chronologie církevní (Church Chronology), the second example of highly derivative but important rewriting of Alsted’s schemes. Finally, I will deal with Jan Amos Comenius (1592-1670), one of the most prominent figures of Czech national canon, whose works received enormous attention, nevertheless, some aspects of his thought, especially his believe in modern prophecies and partly his millenarian thought are still inadequately interpreted. I will attempt to document the shift from the general eschatological motives in his works from the 1620s to more specific expression of the millenarian rhetoric which later became an integral part of his pansophic projects of universal reform.
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