Central European Cultural Transfers in the Humanism and Baroque Periods: Three Examples from Literary History

Abstract

This study investigates cultural transfer in Central Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It focuses on three different fields ( parody Protestant religious song, Christmas drama ) and explores the directions and mechanisms of cultural exchange and the role of mediators in the dissemination of selected literary phenomena. The observation of cultural transfers confirms to some extent the traditional idea of the journey of cultural work from the West to the East. However, the individual transfers are significantly influenced by specific cultural contexts. The social, ethnic and religious situation strongly connected cultural life in the Czech lands with the literary models available in the north-east and southern regions of Germany, while Polish cultural traffic, with a few exceptions, is rather distant from these areas, though. The conditions in Silesia were specific, because a significant share of the population was German and a strong multi-confessional situation prevailed there.