Cosmos and Materiality in Early Modern Prague by Suzanna Ivanič

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cosmos and Materiality in Early Modern Prague by Suzanna Ivanič Eleanor Janega Ivanič, Suzanna. Cosmos and Materiality in Early Modern Prague. Oxford University Press, Oxford and New York, 2021. xii + 244 pp. Illustrations. Notes on orthography and pronunciation. Chronology. Notes. Appendix. Bibliography. Index. £75.00. Religious studies of seventeenth-century Prague can, too often, treat the city’s rich and changing religious culture as homogenic, in which individuals took up the spiritual directives of their leaders as a matter of course. Ivanič’s meticulous and absorbing study of the personal possessions of a range of Prague’s Burghers across the century confronts, complicates and ultimately dismantles this narrative. The introduction of Cosmos sets out how Ivanič will approach the analysis of objects for her study, building on the work of, among others, David Morgan [End Page 566] and Dick Houtman and Bridgit Meyer. Her anthropologically-informed approach allows the book to ‘examine how objects and the material record can cast light on everyday religion’, with an understanding that ‘[r]eligion itself can no longer be seen merely as consisting of texts and ideas, but is instead a cultural force pervading and emanating from the material landscape’ (p. 11). In the first chapter Ivanič introduces seventeenth-century Prague. She deftly presents a picture of the city as it thrived as host to the court of Holy Roman Emperor Rudolf II (1562–1612). Ivanič gives detailed information about the city’s population and topography (religious and otherwise), to describe what she terms Prague’s ‘cosmos of beliefs’ (p. 43), which allowed its residents to navigate their relationships with God via physical, tangible objects. The chapter would serve well as an introduction to seventeenth-century Prague generally for interested audiences, and also does well to set up some of Ivanič’s key arguments. The book then moves into its first section, titled ‘A Shared Cosmos’, the first chapter of which focuses on natural matter in the belongings of Prague Burghers. Here Ivanič shows that strict categories of ‘religious’ or ‘secular’ are misplaced when considering various objects. Instead, we must consider that animal teeth and paws, gemstones, or the special clay Terra sigillata need to be understood as possessing, as Rudolf II’s physician Anselmus Boetius de Boodt (1550–1632) put it, ‘a certain reflection of the gleam of divinity’ (p. 56), which could allow humans to navigate their cosmos. The second chapter of the first section then examines the way goods were exchanged among kinship groups in Prague to show how gifts, such as wedding rings, baptismal spoons and bibles, established and embellished relationships. The section ends in a third chapter which analyses how together these objects created a personal and ever-changing cosmos. Here, Ivanič builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s studies of the object-human relationship to show how both artisans and collectors created a vernacular of items which spanned confessions and shaped how people acted in their homes. It is a particularly incisive section and brings to mind the work of Deleuze and Guttari on productive desire, which I would be excited to see Ivanič incorporate into her work in the future. The second section on ‘Cosmos and Confessions’ applies these concepts in its first chapter to an analysis of the belongings of the clockmaker Kúndrat Šteffenaúr in 1635. We see that Šteffenaúr’s collection of objects seems to reflect a cross-confessional understanding of the world that is specific to Prague and presented its early seventeenth-century inhabitants with options above all else. This section is especially compelling, and I would be interested to see what Ivanič might make of conceptions of imaginary pilgrimage in regards to Šteffenaúr’s ownership of the Itinerarium Sacrae Scripturae (pp. 149–50) — a description of the sacred topography of the bible. The next chapter considers the ‘fracturing of universal Christianity’ (p. 153), and how shifts in belief are [End Page 567] reflected in possessions. Here we are given a particularly interesting analysis of the (relatively late) adoption of the rosary in Prague over the century. The final chapter in this section considers what scholars have termed the pietas Bohemica, or specifically, Czech baroque expressions of Catholic faith...