Jesuit Art and Czech Lands, 1556–1729: Missionizing through the Arts, edited by Kateřina Horníčková and Michal Šroněk

It is a rare pleasure reading a book of essays in which every text contributes insightfully to the success of the whole volume.Jesuit Art and Czech Lands, 1556-1729 offers a fascinating, wide-ranging, and beautifully researched examination of how the Society of Jesus creatively and flexibly wielded art in its efforts to strengthen the Catholic Church and convert Protestants in Bohemia and Moravia.The essays explore the rich and often contentious historical contexts of these lands' early modern religious and cultural landscapes.Michal Šroněk's lengthy introduction delves smartly into the long history of religious dissent beginning with Jan Hus and the resulting Hussite War (1420-34), the reformed Unity of the Brethren, the legally sanctioned Utraquist Church, and the uprising of the Estates (1618-20).St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague was stripped of its paintings and sculptures on December 21-23, 1619.With the imperial victory at the Battle of White Mountain (1620), the Catholic Church reasserted its confessional domination.The Jesuits and older religious orders were crucial agents in the re-Catholicization.Šroněk writes, the "book explores the artistic strategies the Jesuits used to promote and reintroduce the cults of miraculous images and saints and local Catholic customs" (xix) in these lands.They stressed art's didactic, meditative, and visual roles in their missionary activities.The introduction concludes with two maps of Jesuit colleges and Marian pilgrimage sites in the Czech lands, followed by a helpful timeline from 1415 to 1781.In chapter 1 ("The Church that Žižka Destroyed: The First Jesuit Churches in the Czech Lands"), Ondřej Jakubec notes the Jesuits established colleges in seven cities prior to 1600.Typically, they took over older monasteries and churches.In Prague, they moved into the former Dominican monastery of St. Clement by the Charles Bridge in 1556.As later essays make clear, the offering insights that resonate with contemporary academic interests in imperialism, nationalism, and their ideological underpinnings.