Faces of Community in Central European Towns

Concepts of visual communication form an explanatory framework for discussing the visual expressions of urban symbolic communication in urban life in towns in the center of Europe in the late medieval and early modern period, including the dramatic times of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. This book examines the role of images and visual representation by concentrating on the varieties of symbolic communication in towns that made a range of relationships visual: the status and role of urban civic, professional, and religious communities and the relations between the town and its lord or powerful families and individuals. The geographical framework of this book is the region in the former Habsburg countries north of the Danube River embracing the region between western Bohemia and what is today eastern Slovakia, including the borderland towns of northern Austria. Two studies focus on specific local and occupational communities in the Prague towns, but most of the texts in this book focus on small towns by contemporary European standards in which many forms of urban topography, buildings, objects, and monuments survive, even though few written sources have been preserved. Accessing a wide range of literature in regional languages and German for English speakers, this collection describes typical urban landscapes in early modern Central Europe outside the well-known Central European urban centers and traditional areas of study.
The book is a relevant new contribution to medieval and early modern studies, not only covering an underappreciated geographical area but also addressing general questions about the history of rituals and performance as well as visual culture, communication, and identity discourses in late medieval and early modern urban space.

Katerina Hornícková is researcher at the University of Vienna.

Introduction: To Be Seen: The Visual Aspect in Urban Symbolic Communication, Katerina Hornícková List of Abbreviations Chapter 1: Towns in Neighboring Regions, 1400-1700: Austria, Bohemia, Moravia, and the Carpathian Basin, Elisabeth Gruber Chapter 2: The Bohemian Town as a Space for Symbolic Communication (1400-1600), Robert Simunek Chapter 3: Representing bonum commune in Austrian Border-Region Towns: Seals, Fortifications, and Hospitals, Elisabeth Gruber Chapter 4: The Topography of Justice: Symbols, Rituals, and the Representation of Urban Justice in Early Modern Northern Hungary, Blanka Szeghyová Chapter 5: Urban Commemorative Festivities as Representations and Visualizations of Town Order, Tomás Borovský Chapter 6: Insiders' Visions: Memory and Self-Representation in Bohemian Utraquist Towns, Katerina Hornícková Chapter 7: The Representation Practices of the Prague Painters' Guild in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period, Michal Sronek Chapter 8: The Self-Presentation of Burghers in Moravian Seigniorial Towns: Telc and Slavonice in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, Zdenka Míchalová Chapter 9: Public Expressions of Religious Transformation in Moravian Towns (1550-1618), Josef Hrdlicka Chapter 10: Reading the Prague Lesser Town Square: Topography of Change in a Residential City, Jana Doktorová Chapter 11: Epitaphs in the Moravian Royal Cities Around 1600 and their Confessional Imagination, Ondrej Jakubec Chapter 12: The Jesuits and their Urban Visual Presence in the Bohemian Lands, Michal Sronek Chapter 13: Rewriting Memory: Remodelling Churches in Seventeenth-Century Freistadt, Katerina Prazáková Chapter 14: Post-Face(s): On the Relationship of Visual Culture and Urbanity in Late Medieval and Early Modern Central Europe, Katalin Szende