1 Humanist Anthologies as Part of the Competition for ‘National Honour’

Caspar Hirschi’s concept of the contest for ‘national honour’ differs from the conception of early modern nations as direct precursors of modern mass national movements. Although Hirschi rejected modernist conceptions of nationalism (he was particularly sceptical of “the macro-sociologist approach of most modernist theories”¹² of nationality), his conception in some respects resembles Benedict Anderson’s concept of imagined communities. Nations, as abstract communities endowed with a specific honour (Ehrgemeinschaften), evolved from particular corporations at the end of the 15^th century in a process associated with the literary activities of small groups of intellectuals who drove the discourse “that creates and preserves the nation as an autonomous value.”¹³ To quote Hirschi’s detailed definition:¹⁴

The nation can be understood as an abstract community formed by a multipolar and equal relationship to other communities of the same category (i. e. other nations), from which it separates itself by claiming singular qualities, a distinct territory, political and cultural independence and an exclusive honour.

Hence, as Hirschi puts it, the nation was “a political, cultural and linguistic community, inhabiting a territory of its own and sharing an exclusive honour among its members.”¹⁵ In this sense, early modern nationalism is “an all-encompassing contest for honour between these abstract communities”¹⁶ ; therefore, we can also speak of a Humanist agonistic discourse of the nation.

Hirschi emphasises that the early modern nations were formed through a competition, beginning in the late Middle Ages, over symbolic values such as honour and shame; this was a dynamic process because other participants in this contest supplied more and more arguments for the Humanists to address in the name of their community of honour. The relatively equal nature of this competition, however, does not mean that the Humanist debate was not based on the notion of a hierarchical relationship between civilisations. Humanists worked primarily with the dichotomy of civilisation and barbarism, attacking the backwardness of their enemies and defending their own community’s level of civilisation.¹⁷ In their competition for honour, Humanists focused on the specific and immutable qualities of their community. Their agonistic approach was reflected in debates on topics related to prestige and honour, especially in the fields of history (diverse communities could boast different historical narratives or different forms of contact with ancient civilisation), but also contemporary topography, climate, national wealth, political organisation and the level of craftsmanship and education in different countries; very frequently, the competition for national honour concerned everyday customs or the general cultural and moral qualities of the given region’s inhabitants.

According to Hirschi, the formation of early modern nations had a major impact on the social status of those who created them.¹⁸ It was the intellectuals that had the skills and knowledge necessary to compete for honour, including the knowledge of the political and cultural heritage of ancient Rome as a single universal power. They could become the ‘lay priests’ of the national community, which also allowed them to strengthen their direct links to spheres of power, for instance to the ruler and his court. The competition for honour in turn added prestige to their literary activity, including vis-à-vis their potential patrons. As Albert Schirrmeister points out, in this regard, texts concerning national honour were a very successful means of functioning in the literary field and gaining support.¹⁹ Thus, the Humanist scholars claimed honour for other members of the abstract community and in doing so gained recognition for their work.

As I have already shown in another context,²⁰ Hirschi’s concept does not sufficiently take into account the differences between the various European regions. The first images of foreign lands were formed by Italian Humanists on the basis of comparisons with their homeland. These images, in turn, provoked a reaction among Humanists from the Transalpine regions, especially from the German lands and France. Hirschi, however, primarily focuses on how Humanists in Italy, Germany and France developed the role of the learned orator and thereby created a political (sometimes Republican-oriented) agenda for themselves, based on the knowledge of classical antiquity and rhetorical persuasiveness. Yet, the Ciceronian ideal and the agonistic discourse of the nation in the semi-peripheral regions of Central and Eastern Europe also opened up additional possibilities for Humanists, which need to be examined in a micro-perspective. The Humanist competition for honour began later there and, as we shall see, was not necessarily truly multipolar in character – the degree of competition may have varied from region to region. The case study I present here from the Bohemian setting also shows how the agonistic discourse of the nation was particularly connected to literary activities and how what began as intellectuals’ self-presentation gradually came to include other groups of the population, giving rise to a wider community of honour.

The Humanists refuted the charge of barbarism not only through argument but also through their ability to write in a sophisticated style. This is particularly important when it comes to Neo-Latin poetry, which was written and published across Europe and could therefore be directly compared. In this context, the question of how poetry was conceptualised at all is crucial. Besides their knowledge of poetic techniques, authors’ self-presentation rested on the idea that they were vates and that their talents were directly inspired by God.²¹ Poetic activities in the name of a community of honour would thus have a very high degree of legitimacy. The Wettkampf der Nationen produced a large number of Humanist texts, but anthologies of poetry were among the most privileged ways of presenting one’s own country, its people and one’s own literary quality to foreign scholars. Moreover, the principle of the anthology made it possible not only to select from existing materials but also to edit them.

2 Neo-Latin Poetry of the Wittenberg Type

The preparation of the anthology in the context of the competition for national honour was influenced by the specifics of Neo-Latin poetry – above all by its being bound by a number of formal rules (metrical and others) and by the shared norm of imitating ancient models (more or less creatively). As Jane Stevenson points out, the intuitive understanding of metrics had already disappeared by late antiquity. Hence, if students wanted to write metrically and linguistically correct poems in Latin, they first had to undergo the difficult process of learning that. In her words, it was “a learned, highly specialized skill, entirely independent of the ability to comprehend or translate Latin texts.”²² That learning process could take several years, requiring a great deal of repetition and drill. Since the Neo-Latin poetry in the Bohemian lands was strongly influenced by Wittenberg models after 1540, and since a whole generation of Bohemian authors learned how to compose poetry at Leucorea, it is important to understand the peculiarities of its curriculum. Together with other students at the University of Wittenberg they had to master the grammatical, rhetorical and prosodic rules necessary for the later composition of their own poems.²³ The instruction they received included analyses and imitations of works by ancient poets (especially Virgil, Ovid and Horace), the building on the rhetoric of Cicero and Quintilian, as well as compositions by contemporary authors influenced by Lutheranism, such as Helius Eobanus Hessus (whom the Bohemian Humanists at the time acknowledged as their main model).²⁴

The specifics of Wittenberg poetry, as it was transferred to the Bohemian lands, can be illustrated by Philipp Melanchthon’s work, which served as a model for Wittenberg students and teachers.²⁵ Although Melanchthon encouraged others to write Latin poetry and to respond to his own compositions in poetic form,²⁶ he was rather modest about his own poetry.²⁷ His occasional compositions in particular corresponded to the literary norm of the time;²⁸ according to Thorsten Fuchs, his epigrams did not exhibit any high degree of literary sophistication.²⁹ Melanchthon’s poetry addressed a wide range of topics, including complicated theological issues, the war with the Turks and ordinary social events. The work of the Wittenberg teachers typically comprised poems describing the world, the cosmos and the anomalies within it.³⁰

Melanchthon’s work, like that of other learned poets (poetae docti), is characterised by his striving for perspicuitas, i. e. clarity of expression.³¹ At the rhetorical level, his poems were strongly inspired by Horace and Virgil and contained a number of direct quotations and allusions to their works, references to the mythological apparatus etc. Fuchs has shown in particular how Melanchthon’s poems combined ancient subtexts with Biblical motifs.³² The Wittenberg scholars used a relatively limited set of metrical types, which included, in addition to elegiac couplets and dactylic hexameters, iambic dimeters and trimeters, Phalaecian verses, Sapphic stanzas, iambic senarii and hendecasyllabic verses.³³ Volkhard Wels drew early attention to the fact that – although it was primarily intended to convey knowledge and moral instruction – scholarly poetry in the contemporary understanding often simultaneously worked with its readers’ emotions and aesthetic expectations.³⁴ Alongside epistolography, Latin poetry also functioned as an everyday medium of communication among a wider circle of Wittenberg scholars.³⁵ Nevertheless, one still expected a good imitation of ancient models and appreciated its aesthetic effect. Students from the Bohemian lands tried to meet these expectations as well.

3 Farragines poematum as an Anthology

The editors of the Farragines poematum, namely Matthaeus Collinus, Thomas Mitis and Georg Handsch, had all been trained in Wittenberg.³⁶ The heteronomy of the Humanist literary field meant that Humanists were only able to write with the support of various patrons on whom they were completely dependent; Matthaeus Collinus describes this situation laconically in one of his letters to the Saxon poet Georg Fabricius as “qualia praemia, talia carmina” (“what rewards, such poems”).³⁷ Hence, Jan Hodějovský the Elder of Hodějov played a key role in the creation and publication of the Farragines. Hodějovský supported approximately 100 writers (some long-term, others on single occasions) and financed a large part of the literary production of the day in one way or another.³⁸ He mainly funded the publication of books, both translations and original literature in Czech (including the most extensive contemporary print publication, Kronika česká [Bohemian Chronicle] by Václav Hájek of Libočany from 1541). Having himself studied at the Latin schools in Silesia, Freiberg and Wittenberg,³⁹ Hodějovský was particularly interested in Latin occasional poetry and was a long-term supporter of poets, especially if their compositions concerned him or his family personally. Latin poems thus became part of a sophisticated cultural exchange: in return for them, Hodějovský provided the authors with money and various material gifts (often food);⁴⁰ upon request, he helped ‘his’ poets find employment (usually clerical or teaching positions), he interceded on their behalf in legal disputes or negotiations with the authorities, he mediated marriages and he even helped some poets to be elevated to the nobility.⁴¹ He also conveyed other literary works and materials for them, sometimes even assigning them subjects for poetic treatment.⁴²

Although the poems included in the Farragines are mostly undated, occasional references imply that the frequency of exchanges between Hodějovský and ‘his’ poets was in some cases low – some poets contacted him only once in a year or two. For several years before 1537, when Hodějovský was appointed a deputy judge, he had only been in contact with the less important poet Petr Fux;⁴³ the circle of his correspondents increased significantly during the 1540s, when former students from Wittenberg began to return and settle in Prague. Hodějovský came into contact with Collinus and his peers (Sebastianus Aerichalcus, Paulus Aquilinas and Thomas Mitis).⁴⁴ Younger poets, such as Ioannes Banno, Martinus Hanno, Laurentius Span and Georgius Vabruschius,⁴⁵ were recommended by their teachers; Hodějovský suggested them certain topics for poetic treatment, but his contact with them remained rather sparse. He maintained personal contact with the established members of the circle, however, even after he retired from office and moved to the family residence in Řepice in South Bohemia in 1555.

The anthology’s enormous scope rendered its compilation a challenging task, yet the editors dealt with it relatively quickly. The first three volumes of the Farragines poematum were published in 1561, followed by the fourth volume in 1562. The anthology’s title may have been influenced by the desire to present a group of Bohemian poets in the international competition for honour; it probably refers to the poetic authority of Helius Eobanus Hessus and evokes his collection from the late 1530s, Operum Helii Eobani Hessi Farragines duae (“Two Miscellanies of Helius Eobanus Hessus’ works”).

The poems in the anthology were taken from 28 chronologically ordered copybooks, into which Hodějovský had the poems of his Humanist ‘clients’ transcribed, as well as from collections of occasional poetry printed in Prague between 1545 and 1560 (which may themselves have included poems from Hodějovský’s copybooks). No information about the structure or content of 27 of the copybooks has survived: they were burnt, together with part of the Prague city archives in May 1945 during the battle between defenders of Prague and Nazi occupiers. All that we know is that the contributions in these volumes were arranged according to the poets’ names.⁴⁶ In one of the poems (probably from 1554), Collinus indicates that the publication of the copybooks had been considered in the early 1550s, perhaps on a larger scale, but that this plan was eventually abandoned.⁴⁷ In any case, the published version of the Farragines only partially coincides with Hodějovský’s original volumes – from September 1557 onwards, the anthology was edited by Collinus, Mitis and Handsch, whom Hodějovský invited to his country estate in Řepice and hosted there for nine months while they compiled the anthology and prepared it for printing. The fact that the editors were themselves authors of some of the contributions and members of the community that presented itself through the anthology is unusual in comparison with some later anthologies. This approach invalidates the hypothesis that the editor of an anthology takes a fundamentally different approach to the text than the original author and connects texts in a different way than the author would in his own collection.⁴⁸ These categories merge here: the Farragines anthology shows that within a closed Humanist community of poets, anthologies and original collections could fulfil similar functions and purposes.

The etymology of the word anthology tells us that it is in principle the gathering of flowers (anthos + legein), i.e. the selection of the best pieces (whatever the criteria). We can only guess what criteria the editors of the Farragines applied when selecting the poems. In earlier Czech historiography there was an assumption, which is difficult to verify, that one of the main criteria for selection was the absence of politically radical views (in the sense that compositions critical of the Habsburg government did not make the cut).⁴⁹ Nevertheless, there are poems included in the anthology which were written during the Estates Revolt of 1547 and do not avoid politically sensitive topics. The essential criteria for selection rather seem to have been the variety of metre and genre, as well as the range and poetic quality of the individual pieces (which the editors, or at least Collinus, tried to improve through ex-post interventions). According to Collinus, the selection of verses from the copybooks was entrusted to Georg Handsch.⁵⁰ As far as can be judged from the differences between the contents of the last extant copybook and the printed anthology, the editors preferred longer pieces to shorter ones. The anthology also includes poems containing important information about Hodějovský’s patronage, such as the earliest poetic letters from Petr Fux from 1519–1521 and 1538–1548, which the editors heavily reworked, and the rather monotonous elegiae conciliatoriae, i. e. compositions by beginner poets in which they addressed the patron for the first time and asked for his support. In any case, in terms of comparison with other anthologies, it is significant that only a relatively short time elapsed between the writing and publication of the contributions. In this respect, the Farragines are similar to the English Elizabethan miscellanies, which also focused mainly on contemporary or new poems.⁵¹

Hodějovský remained a kind of ‘silent centrepoint’ throughout the project: notwithstanding attempts by some scholars to attribute at least a few of the compositions to the patron himself, his own letters and other texts were not included in the anthology.⁵² The fact that some of the published poets expressed disapproval of Hodějovský’s unwillingness to respond to them in Latin raises the slightly absurd question of whether the patron was able to appreciate properly the literary sophistication of the hundreds of poetic ‘gifts’ addressed to him. In any case, what mattered more than this was how the poems presented Hodějovský as a person, the specific forms of his support and his relations with the poets, and how they presented the Bohemian poetic community and its ability to deal elegantly in poetry with a variety of subjects. The selection process thus made use of two strategies characteristic of the Farragines project: first, it conceived the anthology as a collection of texts representing their patron, and second, it made the anthology a presentation of a group of Bohemian poets representative of the whole of the Bohemian lands and their scholars.

The pieces in the anthology are arranged neither by the author’s name nor chronologically (most are undated), but by metre and poetic type.⁵³ This, too, may have been related to the desire to give a systematic presentation of the Bohemian scholars’ poetic skills. The first volume contains hymns, odes and elegies on religious subjects; only a small share of these works focus on patronage (e. g. hymns celebrating the patron saint of the benefactor). The second volume includes elegies in elegiac couplets and idyllia in epodic metres. The first part contains elegiac compositions of various thematic types – elegiae conciliatoriae, hodoeporica and apophoreta – many of which are compositions in which poets inform the patron about current political and social events and their personal situations. The third volume is divided into sections dedicated to different types of occasional poems (epithalamia, genethliaca, epitaphia and epigrammata, which are rather apophoreta in content); it also contains a section of poems written in Phalaecian hendecasyllabic verses. The structure and metric of the fourth volume of the Farragines imitates the works of Horace, namely his Carmina, Epodae (one book of them) and Epistolae.⁵⁴

Earlier scholars have pointed out that the Farragines anthology is remarkably multifaceted in both content and form in comparison with collections of occasional poetry published by the University of Prague in the coming decades.⁵⁵ This has to do with the fact that the Farragines constitute not a collection but an anthology: a completely different concept of collective work, based on strategic selection from a large amount of pre-existing poetic material. The anthology contains both very mature, sophisticated compositions and student pieces; the poems are of varying lengths and have quite diverse themes (including communication with the patron on practical matters, historical treatises and reflections on recent social and political events), illustrating the breadth of the Bohemian poets’ interests and skills. A few pieces in the Farragines are directly related to subjects that the poets had addressed during their studies at the University of Wittenberg, for instance various astronomical phenomena, signs of God’s wrath and the Turkish wars.⁵⁶

Previous research has focused primarily on what the Farragines can tell us about the functioning of the Humanist literary field and scholarly communication in the Bohemian lands.⁵⁷ The anthology has (quite deservedly) been seen as a platform for representing the patron and the relation between him and ‘his’ poets. Its editors and contributing poets used learnt procedures and even specific, metrically suitable phrases to address the patron (earlier research has drawn attention to the anthology’s strong intertextual links to Horace as well as to similarities with poetic production from the Viennese court).⁵⁸ Specifically, previous research has examined the rhetoric, popular motifs (often encomiastic) and thematic units relevant to the communication between the poets and their patron.⁵⁹ Moreover, it has focused on the ritualised literary practices that were expected when addressing a patron and on the representation of the exchange of ‘gifts’ between the two parties (i. e. with material support on one side and the poem as chartacea dona on the other).⁶⁰ Attention has also been paid to how poets dealt with themes legitimising scholarship, such as nobilitas, amicitia and paupertas.⁶¹

Likewise, attention has been given to the order of individual poems in the anthology and its possible association with scholarly prestige. Early on, Josef Hejnic observed regularities in the arrangement of Humanist collective volumes in the Bohemian lands. According to him, there was particular prestige in placing a poem at the very end or beginning of a collection. The position at the beginning was allegedly typical of university collections, whereas the placement of prestigious pieces at the end of a collection was common in large publications such as the Farragines.⁶² Martínek suggests that the editors of the Farragines tried to use the prestigious positions in the anthology for their own key compositions – Collinus at the beginning and Mitis at the end of each volume.⁶³ It comes as no surprise that these compositions reflect the agonistic dimension of the anthology, which I discuss in the following chapter.

4 The Farragines poematum and the Bohemian Poets’ Competition for Honour

It is of great interest that the Farragines poematum were presented shortly after their creation as a key joint project of Bohemian poets, even in works directed not only towards the Czech environment but also towards the community of European scholars.⁶⁴ The anthology itself then presented the group of Bohemian poets in ‘competition’ with other communities of honour. Throughout the Farragines, Bohemian poets are referred to in lofty epithets implying their dignity, exclusivity and direct relation to the classical tradition, such as “Apollinaeus chorus” (“Apollonian chorus”), “illustris grex” (“illustrious crowd”), “turba Poëtarum” (“throng of poets”), “ordo poeticus” (“the order of poets”) and “literarum candidi cultores” (“brilliant and honest cultivators of learning”). The competition for national honour is most evident in the pieces that were written by the editors themselves and occupy prominent positions within the anthology. As in other later anthologies of poetry, these constitute a specific type of paratext: framing poems, which substituted for editorial prefaces.

The first of them is a poetic epilogue by Thomas Mitis to the first volume of the Farragines. In addition to celebrating Hodějovský’s “generous right hand” (“liberalis dextera”), which made the publication of the anthology possible, it describes the editors’ motives and practices in compiling the anthology: how they selected representative pieces of literary quality, which they then edited accordingly (Mitis writes somewhat vaguely about “castigatio”). Their main reason for compiling the anthology was “bonum” and “honestum patriae” (“homeland’s good and honour”), consisting in overcoming barbarism. In this defence, Mitis enumerates earlier Bohemian Humanists who, in his opinion, met the criteria of the competition for honour: particularly Bohuslaus of Lobkowicz and Hassenstein, followed by Jan Å lechta of VÅ¡ehrdy and Sigismundus Gelenius, who even received recognition from Erasmus of Rotterdam.⁶⁵ Mitis goes on to mention several professors of Prague University and their fields of specialisation. He also draws attention to an important intertext that was frequently quoted within the competition for national honour, namely Italian Humanist Poggio Bracciolini’s letter describing the bravery and intellectual qualities of Jerome of Prague, who was condemned to be burnt at the Council of Constance.⁶⁶

According to Mitis, foreigners (“exteri”) unfairly ask whether anyone has ever seen or read a learned Bohemian poet (“eruditum Vatem”).⁶⁷ The anthology responds to this with proof that poetic production in Bohemia is by no means lagging behind the production in other regions. It is no coincidence, however, that within the competition for honour, poets consider this region to be only Bohemia, i.e. the region adjacent to Germania and Moravia, and not a broader political area, for example the Bohemian lands or the Lands of the Bohemian Crown. Bohemia functions here as a label that has its place within classical and post-classical tradition, referring to a land distinguished by its high quality poetry and its multitude of authors (“Vivos referre plurimos/ Vates velim nihil modo,/ Cum sit Poësis cultior,/ Pro Marte, Pallas et sacra,/ Phoebusque cum sororibus/ Colatur in Bohemia”; “I would very much like to mention the living poets, because poetry is already more cultivated here and sacred Pallas, Apollo and the Muses are worshipped in Bohemia instead of Mars.”).⁶⁸ Here, too, there is explicit comparison with other nations – the Italians, in Mitis’ words, are amazed by the poetic competence of even the youngest Czech schoolchildren.⁶⁹ In the poem’s conclusion, the agonistic model is combined with defense of the book against calumniators and the strategy of attracting new patrons to contribute to the growth of more great poets in Bohemia (“Ut rura dent Bohemica/ (Plures patroni si forent)/ Doctum Maronem, Horatium/ Nasone cum tersissimo”; “so that Bohemian lands, if only there were more patrons, could produce learned Virgil, Horace and most elegant Ovid”).⁷⁰ In other words, the focus is on how the position of the Bohemian lands in the multipolar competition for honour can be further improved.

The epilogue is followed by an introductory poem to the second volume from the quill of another of the editors, Matthaeus Collinus, who was the most prominent proponent of Humanism of the Wittenberg type. Collinus portrays the anthology as a collected evidence that will clear the Bohemian lands of any accusation that they lack civility and will convince the reader that the region has educated, pious and capable poets fighting against barbarism and cultivating the liberal arts and sacred poetry:

‘Then, maybe, future generations both from here and from abroad will know that Bohemia had poets too and that this land did not lie so deep in the darkness of ignorance for the nine Muses to have no place here. They will know that there were people who by their efforts, waged a difficult war against the herds of ignorant and who awakened music and other liberal arts, although not the way it should have been, but each according to their abilities and how destiny and the scarcity of those who promoted sacred poetry would have allowed it.’⁷¹

Collinus himself is one of those poets, and he knows well what poets have to deal with on a daily basis.

The first and second volumes of the Farragines were apparently published simultaneously. Although each volume has separate pagination, the indices for both volumes are placed at the end of the second volume. At first glance, the indices might seem to be a mere practical aid to facilitate the reader in navigating such an extensive collection; surprisingly enough, however, even this paratext may have had an agonistic dimension. The editors obviously took great care over the indices, of which they made several. The Index primus autorum, for example, contains the names of all the poets who appear in the first two volumes of the Farragines, listed in alphabetical order; each name is accompanied by a list of their poems and page numbers. At first glance, then, any reader could clearly grasp the size and intellectual potential of the group of Bohemian poets represented in the anthology. In this sense, the Farragines anthology is characterised by a distinct and clear concept of authorship (indeed, it is no coincidence that some scholars have argued that anthologies from this period are a step on the way towards the modern understanding of authorship).⁷² Another of the indices is, in turn, sorted by genera carminum and presents in a condensed form the poetic skills of the entire group. Two further appendices essentially form an alphabetical index of subjects, containing all the themes addressed in the poems, some of which are obviously related to the competition for honour because they provide information about the Bohemians’ level of civilisation or education (e. g. the reference “Bohemi ab Erasmo Rot. laudati fol. 144”, “Bohemians praised by Erasmus of Rotterdam”).⁷³

Weaker agonistic motifs appear in other pieces in the Farragines as well. For example, in his poem “Epistola Boiemiae ad Regem Ferdinandum” (“Bohemia’s letter to King Ferdinand”), Ioannes Orpheus writes that Latin literature close to the ancient models is still on the rise in the Bohemian lands and he combines this argument with a celebration of the Bohemian noblemen supporting poets.⁷⁴ Other poems are interspersed with historical narratives about previous glorious periods of Bohemian history, especially the Hussite period, when the Bohemian lands came to the forefront of foreigners’ interest and the Bohemians aroused concern from the highest ranks of the Catholic church hierarchy.⁷⁵ Likewise, it is evident that barbaries became a widely shared and adaptable topos, which was already used in early student works: poems in the anthology written by budding students addressed barbarism and ways of extricating oneself from it (preferably through the support of a patron, since gaining such support was these students’ aim); Orpheus promises in one of his elegies to do his best to please his patron – he wants to match the more experienced poets and become one of them, because he is still only a “barbarian” (“Et iungor Latiis Barbarus ecce viris”, “Behold, I, a barbarian, am joining the men from Latium”).⁷⁶

The competition for honour was fully reflected in the pages of the Farragines in the dispute between Bohuslav Hodějovský of Hodějov, a nephew of the anthology’s patron, and Ioannes Schentygarus, who had studied in Wittenberg from 1533 to 1536.⁷⁷ The dispute combines agonistic discourse with reflections on hierarchical order and the right to resist, specifically in the context of the war in the Empire and the Bohemian lands in 1547. At the beginning, Ioannes Schentygarus asks the patron for his opinion on current political events in the Empire. Whereas Jan Hodějovský’s answer has, as usual, not been preserved, Bohuslav then begins to criticise the Bohemian estates. His uncle had probably shown Bohuslav’s poems to some of ‘his’ poets, which led to a dispute.⁷⁸ Schentygarus himself spoke strongly in defence of the Bohemians while criticising Habsburg policy.

Bohuslav’s uncle sent him not to Wittenberg but to the Catholic University of Ingolstadt, where he studied together with Veit Amerbach, a former colleague of Melanchthon who had fallen into a dispute with his teacher over basic theological topics and over the relation between motion and the soul. In the late 1550s, the Czech classical philologist Josef Hejnic interpreted the poetic exchange between Ioannes Schentygarus and Bohuslav Hodějovský as a manifestation of the two authors’ different class and confessional identities (one a Catholic nobleman, the other a Utraquist burgher).⁷⁹ However, in addition to their different estates affiliations, I argue that Wittenberg political theory and the desire to defend the Bohemian nation as a community of honour against accusations of barbarism also played a role. The dispute between Bohuslav Hodějovský and Schentygarus concerned the conduct of the imperial army suppressing unrest in the Bohemian lands and the question of the involvement of the Bohemian estates’ army in fighting abroad. Bohuslav condemned the riots and defended the emperor’s right to suppress resistance – any excesses in the actions of the armies purportedly happened without the emperor’s knowledge. Schentygarus defended the Bohemians against charges of indifference and demonstrated that they enjoyed divine favour, claiming that a courageous and strong nation observes the treaties in force. According to him, Emperor Charles V behaved like a criminal instigator of war (“motor sceleratus belli”): he has started an unjust war, for which he would be punished.⁸⁰ Although there are cases of just war, inciting a fight against one’s own subjects is not one of them. In Schentygarus’ conception, common subjects have at least some right to resist if the injustices committed against them are really serious. Schentygarus analogously defended the Bohemian estates’ right to resist and was critical of Akta těch vÅ¡ech věcí, které sou se […] léta tohoto 1547 sběhly (“The Records of all those Things that Happened […] in the Year 1547”), issued by Ferdinand I, which accused the Czechs of treason. In this context, he refers directly to the concept of tyranny as a barbaric form of government and gives historical examples of tyrannical rulers who deprived their subjects of freedom.⁸¹ Freedom, he explains, is also desired by contemporary peoples, including the Saxons and Bohemians.

Schentygarus’ attitude was, however, radical among the Wittenberg graduates from the Bohemian lands; the others, in their compositions, expressed negative views of any disruption of the existing political order. They considered the revolt against the secular authorities to be a feature of barbaric behaviour, which had no place in a community of honour. The former Wittenberg students labelled the rebellious people as “vulgus”, referring to the instability of their views and values (“mobile vulgus”), their barbaric behaviour, their ferocity (“ferox vulgus”), their disrespect for education or sheer insanity (“crassi dementia vulgi”) and their sinful lust (“dira libida vulgi”).⁸²

5 The Humanist Competition for Honour in Collections of Poems from the 1540s–1560s

In the second half of the 1540s, the group of authors responsible for the creation of the Farragines anthology, led by Matthaeus Collinus, began to publish collections of poetry in which various types of minor occasional poetry, influenced by the Wittenberg milieu, established themselves in the Bohemian environment. Again, the paratexts to these collections contain agonistic motifs. A presentation of Bohemian poets is evident in one of the earliest congratulatory collections on marriage, Collinus’ Tria epithalamia (“Three congratulatory wedding poems”) from 1545 (the shift from purely religious subjects to occasional poetry, in this case inspired by Catullus, had been announced by Collinus in the preface to his collection Carmen de sponsalibus (“A poem about a wedding”) a year earlier).⁸³ The work celebrates three weddings that had taken place in the previous three years: the marriage of Jan Hodějovský the Elder to Anna Žabková of Limberk in 1542 and the later weddings of the poet Vitus Traianus and the patron Adam Carolus. The introductory epithalamium, addressed to Hodějovský, has a structure with which Collinus might have become familiar in Wittenberg and which also appears in later epithalamia: the Muses speak successively in different metres, reflecting on the importance of marriage and its positive aspects and wishing the bride and groom well. At the same time, Collinus develops strategic considerations about gaining support for occasional poetry. The composition “Ad Apollinem” (“For Apollo”) is addressed to Vitus Traianus; it is a kind of ‘programmatic poem’, in which Collinus explains how poets in the Bohemian lands should equal German authors.⁸⁴ Collinus directly invites Apollo and the Muses to visit the Bohemian lands after they have already visited “Germaniam” and “barbara Pannonicae loca” (“Germany and barbarian places of Hungary”). The poem eventually ends with a promise of their imminent arrival. Bohemia is by no means lacking in poets, patrons or themes comparable to those of ancient Greece: “Materiam tellus daret haec ad carmina, quantam/ Non Helicon tibi, non Hellas et ipsa daret” (“This land would give you more topics for poems than the Mount Helicon or Greece itself could give you”) writes Collinus.⁸⁵ In this context, the German lands are not presented as a competing territory, but as a direct source of intellectual transfer; Germania, according to Collinus, is the most significant site of contemporary education: at the end of the poem, the chorus of the Muses declaims:

‘Now we have Mount Helicon, Mount Parnasus, the deep spring of Hippocrene and wealthy support in the German lands. The illustrious heroes offer us hospitality and some are willing and ready to sustain us; they protect us against the enemies and take good care of us.’

Collinus also enumerates leading Bohemian poets and identifies specific epithalamic compositions that he considers to be sufficiently refined as to show a level of poetry comparable to other lands and the local ‘cold regions’. The motif of cold (presumably in contrast to sunny Italy), as we shall see, recurs more frequently in the mid-century compositions.

In the introductory poem to Mitis’s collection Ode de feriis divae Catharinae (“Ode about the feast of St Catherine”) (1550), Ioannes Banno also comments on the community of honour, attacking barbaric calumniators and claiming that Bohemia will soon have enough learned men (“Barbare, quid clamas, quod non tot patria doctos/ Nostra viros habeat, pulchra quot Ausonia?/ Praemia da Musis, surget mox copia Vatum./ Mox doctos pariet terra Bohema viros”; “Barbarian, what are you shouting about our country not having so many learned men as beautiful Italy? Do give rewards to Muses, and the number of poets will increase soon, the Bohemian land will soon give birth to learned men.”).⁸⁷

Elements of agonistic discourse appear, too, in early collections of epicedia, and in particular Epicedia scripta honestis et eruditis viris M. Martino Hannoni et Briccio Sithonio (“Funeral poems on virtuous and learned men, the Master Martinus Hanno and Briccius Sithonius”), published by Collinus in 1551. This collection commemorates, among others, the deaths of several young poet-students, primarily Martinus Hanno and Briccius Sithonius (who both died in Wittenberg in November 1550) and Venceslaus Sicchius (who died in the spring of 1546). The collection contains epitaphia and epicedia by Collinus, Mitis, Ioannes Balbinus and Veit Winsheim the Younger (son of Wittenberg professor of Greek Veit Winsheim, who also taught Bohemian students). The biographies of the deceased are combined with the poetic lament of personified Bohemia over the promising poets who studied in Wittenberg, an outstanding centre of education.⁸⁸ Hanno was also taken up in a later collection, Funebria aliquot (“Several funeral poems”) (1553), which was published at the instigation of Jan Opit of Maličín and included contributions from many of the poets represented in Farragines, in particular in the form of funeral poems on Opit’s relatives. The epicedia on Hanno also praise his character, his true piety and his intellectual skills, including his knowledge of several languages and his “dexteritas styli.” His departure to paradise is depicted as a kind of “eternal school” (“schola perenna”). In the context of the formation of a community of honour, the epicedia mention recently deceased scholars from the Bohemian lands (to show that this is not an insignificant or small group) and the personification of Bohemia laments the loss of a young talent.⁸⁹ Therefore, the intellectual qualities and potential of Bohemian poets and the Bohemian lands were illustrated and presented even in the context of deaths. Some of the poems mourning Martinus Hanno were later selected for the third volume of the Farragines as an example of the Bohemian poets’ skill in writing high quality epitaphia.

Agonistic motifs further appear in one of the last joint projects undertaken by the poets supported by Hodějovský, a collection on the marriage of Martin Mitis (the half-brother of Thomas Mitis) entitled De nuptiis […] Martini Socolovini (“On the wedding of Martinus Socolovinus”) (1563). Thomas Mitis seems to have organised the collection for his brother and had it printed. Besides his own poems, the collection contains contributions by most of the members of Hodějovský’s circle active in the preceding decade (Collinus, Lupáč, Rosinus, Kuthen and Codicillus). The idea of a competitive community of honour, however, is already associated here with criticism of occasional poetry – in the introductory poem, Collinus mentions the difficulty of writing such a large quantity of occasional poetry; the tribute to Martin Mitis is to be his last epithalamium.⁹⁰ In the future, he claims, he is planning to write only more extensive works to devote himself to the celebration of Bohemia and thus to imitate the works of his poetic models known from the Wittenberg curriculum, such as Helius Eobanus Hessus and Georgius Sabinus, who successfully followed Virgil and Ovid.

The first generation of former Wittenberg students also referred to the authority of the imperial Humanists and quoted their texts in agonistic contexts. Collinus, for example, included in his collection Latro in cruce poenitentiam agens (“The thief repenting on the cross”) (1540) an introduction by Veit Amerbach, praising the military and scholarly traditions of the Bohemians.⁹¹ Melanchthon’s dedication to Venceslaus Nicolaides’ collection Cantiones evangelicae (“Evangelical Songs”) (1554), was frequently quoted as well; in it Melanchthon writes, with reference to Homer, that civilisationally advanced ancestors of contemporary Bohemians, known as the Heneti, lived in Phrygia in Asia Minor. He praises their descendants for their high level of education and fine cities (“pulchritudo urbium et gravitas disciplinae”) and the fact that they have increasingly focused on writing literature instead of warfare. This change is illustrated with the examples of Bohuslaus of Lobkowicz and Hassenstein and Sigismundus Gelenius and their “scripta loculenta” (“brilliant works”).⁹² It is not surprising that this intertext was also included in a series of editions of Hassenstein’s works prepared by Thomas Mitis, one of the editors of the Farragines anthology;⁹³ paratexts to those editions represent the culmination of the earliest phase of the Humanist competition for honour in the Bohemian lands.

6 The Culmination of the Competition for Honour in the 1560s: Editions of Bohuslaus of Lobkowicz and Hassenstein

The first generation of Wittenberg students often mention Bohuslaus of Lobkowicz and Hassenstein as the most important Humanist scholar and poet of the turn of the century, who proved the high level of civility in the Bohemian lands already at that time. Their aim was thus not only to preserve the memory of their famous predecessor, but also to involve his life and work in the defence of the newly emerging community of honour.

It is likely that Thomas Mitis had planned to publish the works of various Bohemian Humanists active around 1500, which would have been a welcome argument in the competition for honour, but his plans were abandoned for financial reasons.⁹⁴ An edition of the work Bohemiae et procerum eius laudes (“Praises to Bohemia and its nobles”) by Hieronymus Balbus, an Italian Humanist active in Vienna and elsewhere, was procured by Laurentius Span as early as 1560. It contains, among other texts, Balbus’ extensive poem “De patria Bohuslai Bohemia” (“About Bohemia, homeland of Bohuslaus of Hassenstein”). This offered Bohemian Humanists the opportunity to present a text that was written by a contemporary of Hassenstein and provides a systematic description of the land (Bohemia) and the manners of its inhabitants. “Terra colenda mihi, tantum cui ferre Poetam fata dabant”⁹⁵ (“I must honor the land which was fated to carry such a poet”) Balbus writes – suggesting that what he found interesting about Bohemia was that a Humanist poet born and living there was able to compete with foreign authors. In 1547, Mitis published Vlastae Bohemicae historia (“The history about Vlasta, the Bohemian girl”), a work on the history of the mythical Maidens’ War by Racek Dubravus of Doubrava, a Humanist lawyer and a vigorous opponent of Luther.

As for Hassenstein himself, Thomas Mitis began working on a comprehensive edition of his works shortly after he had prepared the Farragines anthology with Collinus and Handsch. In 1563–1570, he published, in cooperation with other Humanists of Hodějovský’s circle, four extensive volumes containing editions of Hassenstein’s complete works as they were then known, i. e. his Latin speeches, correspondence and poems. Like the Farragines, this must have been a very time-consuming project: besides the texts themselves, Mitis also provided a large amount of paratextual material that has been neglected by modern researchers, such as encomiastic poems, biographical additions, quotations, excerpts from letters and other texts by Hassenstein’s contemporaries and later scholars. All of this was to prove that Hassenstein was indeed not only the greatest Bohemian poet to date (“patria cui nondum similem dedit atque secundum”, “the country has not yet produced a similar or another such poet”)⁹⁶ but also, crucially, on a par with the greatest of European Humanist authors; at the same time, it enabled Mitis and his contemporaries to present their own intellectual skills and contacts.

Hassenstein’s detailed biography Vita per Th. Mitem collecta (“The life collected by Thomas Mitis”) was already incorporated into the 1563 edition of the orations.⁹⁷ As the title suggests, Mitis had to ‘compile’ this biography – besides the biographical narrative, it consisted of statements attributed to Hassenstein and, above all, testimony about him. Throughout the editorial project, Mitis used statements from foreign authorities (so-called “externi viri”) in his competition for national honour. Concerning Hassenstein, there was purportedly a “consensus multorum eruditorum” (“consensus among many scholars”), headed by the aforementioned Hieronymus Balbus, Augustinus Moravus, Erasmus Pinifer and Ulrich von Hutten.⁹⁸ According to Hassenstein’s contemporaries, it was thanks to him that the Bohemian lands began to excel not only in warfare but also in rhetoric and literature (“eloquentia et Musae”).⁹⁹ In the editions, Hassenstein is presented as an unquestionable authority, to whom his contemporaries turned with requests to assess their writings as to the “prince of scholars” (“ut pote ad principem literarum”).

According to Collinus, the scholars working at the University of Prague at that time were barely able to write a few lines and the noblemen were not great scholars either.¹⁰⁰ Hassenstein, however, was a different case altogether. Mitis’ editions represent him as a nobleman who, thanks to his education, eschewed the lifestyle of the aristocracy of the time. Based on Fabricius’ letter, he was a unique phenomenon among the nobility (“suis temporibus nullo homine docto inferior, nobilitate plurimis anteferendus, usu, et experientia omnibus”, “he was no lesser than any learned man of his time, more noble than many, and the most skilled and knowledgeable of them all”).¹⁰¹ In addition to his admirable intellectual skills, Hassenstein was unique in what he spent his money on as an aristocrat – namely on the support of literary activities instead of dissolute excesses – in regard of which the contemporary nobility could learn from him.¹⁰²

The period before Hassenstein can be described using the category of ‘barbarism’ and the fight against it. Hassenstein allegedly brought the Muses to cold Bohemia and, on his long journeys, acquired for the Bohemians previously unknown classical authors.¹⁰³ In fact, in one of his edited poems addressed to Balbus, he himself writes precisely about the cold and barbarism of the Bohemian lands (“Arctoasque hyemes, aeternaque frigora quaeris,/ Et iuvat in nostra vivere barbarie”, “you seek out artic and eternal cold and rejoice at living in our barbaric land”).¹⁰⁴ He needs to protect the Muses from the contempt of the people and the savage and terrible barbarians (“barbara turba”; “pessimorum multitudo barbarorum”, “herd of barbarians”; “a great number of worst possible barbarians”).¹⁰⁵ The situation in the Bohemian lands, however, changed radically under his influence, and Hassenstein’s poems are the best evidence against the charge of barbarism. Mitis’ edition quotes Georg Fabricius recalling how reading Hassenstein’s poems made his professor at the University of Bologna change his opinion of the inhabitants of the Transalpine regions (“provinciales homines”) and stop considering them barbarians.¹⁰⁶ Hassenstein became a light for the whole country, and later poets were like stars that reflect his light.¹⁰⁷

Span writes that Hassenstein was born in a barbaric time (“ea aetate, qua barbaries faedissima literas humaniores oppresserat”, “in those times when foul barbarity was oppressing education and learning”) when the ornamental style had only developed in Italy.¹⁰⁸ From the viewpoint of the Humanist competition for honour, this means that Hassenstein, as a representative of the Bohemian nation, was directly comparable to Italian poets, the successors of the classical literary tradition. According to mid-century Humanists, Hassenstein was a competitor to the Italians themselves (“cum ipsis Italis certare videbatur”, “he seemed to compete with Italians themselves”), even surpassing them in talent and diligence.¹⁰⁹ This made him famous beyond the borders of the Kingdom of Bohemia. “Hic est, Italicis certat quo barbara tellus/ Vatibus, hic est cui pulcher Apollo favet” (“He is the one thanks to whom the barbarian land competes with Italian poets, he is the one whom beautiful Apollo favours”) writes Simon Fagellus Villaticus about Hassenstein.¹¹⁰

What this agonistic motif does not mean, however, is that Hassenstein participated in the competition for national honour in its radical multipolar form, as Caspar Hirschi assumed. As Hassenstein’s editors saw it, there was a country whose scholars were not in competition with Hassenstein or his successors; on the contrary, they considered themselves ‘colleagues’ of some sort: Germania, especially the areas bordering Bohemia. Therefore, in excerpts from the correspondence between Georg Fabricius and his Bohemian friends, such as Collinus and Ioannes Banno, we encounter the idea of Fabricius’ affection for Bohemia and their shared enthusiasm for working together on the presentation and celebration of the Bohemian nation (they use such phrases as “affectus animi”/“affections of the soul”, “propensio animi”/“propensity of the soul”, “ardor de ornanda nostra gente et in noticiam exterarum quoque nationum adducenda”/“ardent desire to adorn our nation and make it known to foreign nations”, and “pia benevolentia erga gentem nostram”/“gentle kindness to our nation”).¹¹¹ The paratexts also repeatedly emphasise the close connection between the editor (and his co-workers) and Wittenberg. Although Hassenstein was a Catholic and even aspired to the post of bishop, Bohemian Humanists celebrated him by quoting authors of various denominations, including their Wittenberg professors.

Mitis and his co-workers distinguished, of course, between Bohemia and Germania – for them, Hassenstein was “natione Bohemus”, not “natione Germanus”; indeed they also edited some celebratory quotations from foreign authors to reflect this.¹¹² In one of Mitis’s letters, he is described as “our Hassenstein” (“noster Hassisteinius”), whereas Fabricius in his reply refers to him as “your hero” (“heros vester”).¹¹³ Yet when it was desirable in terms of celebratory representation, they did not hesitate to associate the Bohemian and German lands. They could thus praise Hassenstein’s library, which was allegedly the best and most numerous, surpassing the libraries in all Germania.¹¹⁴ In support of their argument, they did not hesitate to include a quotation from a letter by David Chytraeus, saying that Hassenstein was the most gifted and stylistically most sophisticated poet in the whole of Germania at that time (“cuius ingenio tota Germania nullum eo tempore habuit praestantius et politius”).¹¹⁵

7 Conclusion

From the point of view of literary theory, anthologies and the poems contained in them always interact with the culture of the time in which they are written.¹¹⁶ From this perspective, they are more than just “a prime medium for preserving and disseminating poetry.”¹¹⁷ The Farragines anthology, however, could not perform the functions that were common in anthologies in the modern period. Its publication thus could not help revising the poetic canon; it could not comment on what constituted proper poetry or even teach the reader to read and write it. It neither mediated between literary culture and individual readers, as Barbara Benedict demonstrated on commodified literary miscellanies from the 18^th century, nor did it redefine readers’ subjectivity by presenting reading as a critical activity.¹¹⁸ The Farragines did not comprise what Aleida Assmann referred to as “cultural texts.”¹¹⁹ Humanist editors did not transform certain compositions into unquestionable ‘cultural assets’ or ‘monuments’ which would influence the perception of poetry and become part of cultural memory, to which subsequent generations would relate and from which they would derive their common identity, as modern anthologies later would.¹²⁰ After all, from the early 19^th century onwards, when Latin ceased to be a widely shared means of communication, Neo-Latin poems had rather little influence on the formation of cultural memory within the emerging national movements.

Nevertheless, the Farragines collection has a lot in common with the vernacular anthologies made abroad – especially in terms of the very meaningful selection of specific pieces and the functions the collected poems were to fulfil. As we have seen, the Humanists in the Farragines were primarily concerned with presenting a representative selection of their poems capable of standing up to competition from foreign scholars. The anthology was a self-presentation tool and a specific means of movement in the literary field rather than a ‘cultural text’.

The first phase of the Humanist competition for honour in the Bohemian environment began with the first collections of occasional compositions, continued with the Farragines and culminated in Thomas Mitis’ extensive editorial project to make Hassenstein’s known works available. Bohemian scholars did not enter the competition until relatively late (shortly before 1550), when the first poems praising the quality of local Latin education appeared and Humanists began to celebrate authors active around 1500 as their immediate predecessors. The situation in Western Europe around 1550 was entirely different, according to Hirschi: after a previous phase during which images of foreign countries were created and comparisons drawn with them, in the middle of the century intellectual competition entered a phase of political propaganda, consolidation and real political struggle.¹²¹

Our case study from the Bohemian environment allows us to reflect on the development and internal transformations of Humanist ideas of the nation as a community of honour. Once again, it is necessary to note the difference between the anthologisation of Latin poems and poems in vernacular languages. An anthology of, for example, Czech poems (which began to be written on a larger scale later) might also demonstrate competition for the nation’s honour, but this could not be multipolar because the collection would lack a foreign audience. Unlike anthologies and miscellanies of the early modern period in vernacular languages, an anthology of Latin poems probably did not even attempt to gain the popularity and commercial success sought after by anthologies and miscellanies of the early modern period in vernacular languages.¹²²

The Latin frame poems in the Farragines and the programmatic compositions in the earliest collections of occasional poetry offered a general conception of Bohemia, its civility and the competitiveness of Bohemian poets in relation to foreign countries. The main aim of the Farragines was to present the intellectual and literary qualities of Bohemian poets. Therefore, its conception was still not inclusive – it had not yet developed a language and discourse of honour that would allow for the inclusion of the different classes of the population of the Bohemian lands. According to Hirschi, this earlier concept of honour was closely linked to the distinctions in late medieval society, whereas the language of national honour and shame from the 16^th and 17^th centuries made it possible to integrate almost all social groups living in a particular territory. This shift took place only after the Farragines and the earliest collections of occasional poetry in which, for instance, the vaguely defined vulgus was described as an enemy of poets and scholars, not as a social group with which poets shared certain qualities. However, the shift is already evident within editions of authors active around 1500 that contain clearer historical narrative and give space to other voices in the paratexts (these could be celebratory quotations from the works or letters of foreign authors, for example). The 1560 edition of Hieronymus Balbus included, among other things, Balbus’s encomiastic poem “De patria Bohuslai Bohemia”; not only was this written by a contemporary of Bohuslaus of Lobkowicz and Hassenstein, but it also provides a systematic description of the land and the characteristics of its inhabitants. A much greater response was obtained by Philipp Melanchthon’s praise of the growing level of education in the Bohemian lands and of the Heneti as the direct ancestors of the Bohemian nation. Against the background of this interpretation, we can already see how an idea was emerging of the Bohemians as a clearly defined abstract community inhabiting a certain territory and characterised by specific virtues. This trend was then fully developed in late Humanist discussions of the origin of the tribe of the Bohemians, which addressed the specific qualities of a broadly defined national community.¹²³

As we have seen, it is also typical of Latin poems that they do not completely reject foreign cultural and civilisational influences (conversely, they develop the idea of the transfer of a new type of poetry) and that they do not compete with all foreign regions. On the contrary, the Latin poems we have discussed emphasise the positive link between Bohemia and the German lands and the scholars there. Most specifically, they highlight links with Wittenberg and Melanchthon, for example, as the most significant teaching figure of the generation. Germania is presented as a place from which the achievements of civilisation are transferred to the Bohemian lands; at the same time, it is a space adhering to similar values and of spiritual affinity, which does not compete with the Bohemian lands. The inspiring quality of Humanist poetry in Hungary is mentioned once as well.

Nevertheless, this cooperation also applies within the community of honour and co-determines who is a member. If we were to use modern terminology, the community established and described by the Humanist poets would not be ‘Czech’ but ‘Bohemian’ – i. e., it is related to Bohemia, its qualities, its past and its ties to ancient civilisation, but it is not associated with one’s primary linguistic competence before receiving a Latin education. In this period, the Bohemian lands were not only a multi-confessional but also a multi-ethnic and multilingual territory. Around 1560, scholarly communication here was conducted in Latin; after all, even poetry in vernacular languages was only just emerging at that time. Some of the Bohemian poets at this time came from German-speaking areas of the Bohemian lands and did not speak Czech, yet these are quite naturally included in the community of honour. For example, Georg Handsch, who was responsible for selecting the poems for the anthology, came from the town of Leippa (Lípa, today Česká Lípa) and did not learn Czech until he was an adult, after his arrival at the University of Prague. The Humanist conception of the nation as an abstract community of honour thus transcended the ethnic and linguistic boundaries of the time. This is even more interesting if we consider how vehemently the Czech national movement after 1800 worked with a negative and even hateful image of everything German, including its closest neighbours and especially the German-speaking population living in the Czech lands. Hirschi has claimed that Humanist nationes “marked an important step” towards later nations.¹²⁴ The Czech case I have presented here shows how complicated such (dis)continuity could be and that the subsequent steps in this long-term process deserve research attention.