Hymnography of the early Modern period and its Czech-German relations

The paper concentrates on Czech hymnography in the 17(th) and 18(th) centuries in Central European context and traces specific contact zones between Czech works and the foreign-language, especially German environment. While in the 16(th) century Czech works exercised an influence beyond the borders of the Czech lands, this ceased to be the case in the Post-White Mountain period. The author discovers that the majority of Czech lyrics from the period between 1640 and 1750 are translations, adaptations and paraphrases of German texts which were selected from a wide variety of sources and authors. Thus, poetry from different periods and various spiritual streams of German literary life was introduced into the Czech environment. These ranged from the early Reformation period, the Catholic Reformation, the Lutheran Baroque, its latter variant in the form of Pietism, to the early seeds of the Enlightenment (poets such as Angelus SILESIUS, Friedrich VON SPEE, Paul GERHARDT, Johann HEERMANN, Johann FRANCK, Johann Athanasius FREYLINGHAUSEN, Nicolas Ludwig ZINZENDORF, Anna NITSCHMANN, etc.). Owing to the German stimuli, the spectrum of genres in Czech hymnography of the 17(th) and 18(th) centuries is comparatively rich and diversified.