Visual Arts; Middle Ages; Bohemia; Book Illumination; Czech

As early as around 1360, the Bible had been completely translated into Czech in the Augustinian canons’ monastery of Roudnice. However, the vernacular edition only gained special significance for all of Bohemia with the appearance of the theologian Jan Hus (1369-1415). Hus and his followers saw the Holy Scriptures, the Word of God, as the only religious guideline, which every individual believer had to follow (without the mediation of the Church). At the Charles University in Prague, they, therefore, worked on the publication and constant improvement of the Czech Bible, which underwent three redactions until the 1430s. The development of the diacritical marks is attributed to this very endeavour, and even to Jan Hus himself. The use of the vernacular was not only a religious-political and social statement: the use of the vernacular was always connected with didactic goals - and these in turn with ‘illustrating’ the subject matter through images. For the scribes of illustrated Czech Bible editions, this meant that they had to develop new concepts for the type area together with the illuminators. Not only did the text lengths of Latin and Czech differ the tradition of announcing each Bible book with highlighted initials caused problems especially when script and image were to enter into an intimate relationship in the form of historiated initials. Not every letterform is suitable for incorporating figural scenes - a practical problem that is already apparent at the beginning of every Czech Bible. What to do when Genesis no longer begins with an ‘I’, which traditionally gave rise to the representation of God’s daily works? What should be done, if the letters N, W, Y or Z very often formed the frame for the pictorial representation? Scribes and illuminators found new, creative solutions for this, some of which were so successful that they were even adopted by letterpress printing.