Projects

The Milada Blekastad Papers

The aim of the project is to digitize the extensive scientific and cultural correspondence of the Czech-Norwegian Comeniologist, translator and literary historian Milada Blekastad-Topičová (1917–2003). More »

T. G. Masaryk’s International Correspondence Networks and the Establishment of Czechoslovakia in 1918

Did the first Czechoslovak president T. G. Masaryk have a lot of contacts abroad? With whom did he keep in written contact prior to World War I? And how did these contacts benefit the establishment of the Czechoslovak state? These questions should be answered by the research project carried out in the Masaryk Institute and Archives of the Czech Academy of Sciences since 2018, which marks a new stage in traditional Masaryk studies. The objective of this project is to provide access to Masaryk’s correspondence, using the tools of the current digital era, to Czech and foreign researchers as well as to the general public, with an emphasis on foreign correspondents from the intellectual and political sphere. More »

Alois Musil and the beginnings of Oriental Studies in Czechoslovakia

The project is oriented towards the development of open source software HIKO intended to capture historical correspondence and correspondence networks for the purpose of processing and making available a unique cultural heritage from the end of the 19th and the first half of the 20th centuries. The software developed will, as part of the project, be applied to the unique historical source material and the correspondence network of the outstanding figure in Oriental Studies in interwar Czechoslovakia, the arabist, orientalist and biblical scholar Alois Musil. More »

Correspondence in the Jan Patočka Archive and his Collected Works

The nucleus of the Jan Patočka Archive at the Centre for Theoretical Study and the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences is Patočka’s handwritten legacy (approximately 10,000 manuscript pages). These papers, which are accessible to researchers, are gradually being edited and published as part of the Collected Works of Jan Patočka (issued since 1996 by the publishing house OIKOYMENH and currently comprising 19 volumes). More recently work on digitisation and the possibilities of accessing the archive online has been taking place. More »

Communication Networks in the History of Czech Art – The Correspondence of Zdeněk Wirth (1878–1961)

These are two interconnected projects that together create a platform to enable gradual access to the unique and extensive collection of the official and private correspondence of Zdeněk Wirth (1878–1961), a leading figure in Czech art history, heritage preservation, museology, and cultural policy. Most of these documents reveal the rich network of contacts he built up over many years; this network was a key starting point for him in coordinating the activities of the cultural sphere in the interwar period, when he was the head of the Department of Enlightenment of the Ministry of Education and National Enlightenment, as well as afterwards. More »

Marcus Marci of Kronland Correspondence

The focus of the research is the correspondence produced by the professor of medicine Jan Marek Marci from Kronland, the Dean of the Prague Medical Faculty and later also University Rector. This scholar who was author of ca ten printed books, achieved fame inter alia for his discoveries in physics (spectroscopy, physical optics) and medicine (neurology). More »

Correspondence networks of post-White Mountain scholars in the Czech lands

The correspondence of the Flemish Jesuit mathematician Theodore Moretus (1602–1667) and other Jesuit mathematicians active in the Bohemian lands, and likewise of the Silesian doctor and publisher of the first medical journal Miscellanea curiosa medico-physica Philipp Jakob Sachs von Löwenheim (1627–1672) form an integral part of this project. Among those who received their letters were the leading scholars of the time Athanasius Kircher, Giovanni Battista Riccioli and Henry Oldenburg. The correspondence documents the scholars’ attachment to the European republic of letters, and thus too that of the region, and together with the correspondence of Jan Marek Marci contributes to the knowledge of post-White Mountain learned community and its intellectual world in the Bohemian lands. More »

The Correspondence of Amand Polan von Polansdorf

Amand Polan von Polansdorf (1561–1610), known also as Amandus Polanus, was a Calvinist theologian born in Silesia and author of a number of important theological works. He studied in his native Troppau (Opava) and in Breslau (Vratislavia, Wrocław), Tübingen, Basel and Genf (Genève, Geneva) between 1577 and 1584. He later worked as tutor in the Žerotín’s family during the studies of Jan Diviš of Žerotín in Heidelberg and Basel (1584–1590). More »