After World War II, the improvement of housing conditions was one of the Yugoslav political and social care priorities. Although the guidelines for housing development were politically planned, the authorities had to adapt to the increasing demand of the growing population. The shift in housing policy from the 1960s made it possible for Slovenian architects to apply the idea of a neighbourhood unit in organized housing construction. Planned along major arterial roads into Ljubljana, the new neighbourhood units were envisaged to meet all the workers’ needs, off ering housing with the infrastructure necessary for quality living. They never fully developed into social hubs with all public services; nevertheless, they still represented a huge change in quality of life. Over the decades, new neighbourhoods signifi cantly changed the appearance of Ljubljana. URL: https://www.upjs.sk/filozoficka-fakulta/katedra-historie/10984/

Drawing on urban and church archival sources such as handbooks, legal texts and birth registers, this study deals with changes in transitional rituals in the multi-denominational town of Slaný in Bohemia in the years 1600–1640. It focuses on both religious and civil rituals and shows how they changed in the course of the Counter-Reformation.

This study investigates how the council of the Free City of Regensburg reacted to and tried to cope with the challenges posed by the so-called Town War (1387–1389) to everyday life in a late medieval city. One hundred and forty-one ordinances (Ratsverordnungen) issued by the Regensburg council between 1381 and 1389 are surveyed, investigating how the councillors sought to regulate human interaction in a city threatened by war, how they tried to implement their regulatory measures and which means they used to encourage the urban population to comply with their precepts. Furthermore, the study explores the Town War’s effects on the council’s standing and authority, and elucidates the delicate political negotiations necessary to legitimize the surveyed regulations. Overall, the paper sheds light on the Town War as a crisis during which governmental social control accelerated, thus contributing to long-term processes of late medieval Herrschaftsverdichtung.

From the second half of the thirteenth century, economic privileges of cloth merchants became almost a norm in the cities of Central Europe, including Poland. The same entrepreneurs constituted at the same time a group that exercised power in their cities. From the fourteenth century, the aspirations of local textile manufacturers became apparent, they demanding the right to free retail sales of their products. The resulting conflict with merchants was permanent. However, it was not connected with the demands of gaining access to power in the town, although at the same time the weavers were involved in struggles of a political nature. This state of affairs is the starting point for an examination of the characteristics of the course of the aforementioned conflict in Polish cities and a consideration of its possible causes.

The author analyses Peter Eschenloer’s Wrocław Chronicle from the second half of the fi fteenth century. His interpretations are based on the theory of the relationship between power, space and representation. The Wrocław chronicler simultaneously defended the denial of the city’s obedience to the Bohemian king (who was in dispute with the pope) and condemned the riots provoked by the city’s municipality. The key part of the German-language version of Eschenloer’s chronicle takes place during a period when the town council faced a series of attacks to its authority. Eschenloer presents the reader with a “representation of (dis)order” in the form of the breakdown and disunity of the town and its consequences, laying groundwork that enables him to emphasize the legitimacy of the town councillors’ actions and present the bounds of their authority as inclusive of all public space. URL: https://www.upjs.sk/filozoficka-fakulta/katedra-historie/10984//

The main goal of the presented study is to present the implementation of the lex Perek in the context of the national struggle for compulsory schooling in the example of Moravian cities, which in historical memory have become a symbol of the Czech–German ethnic confl ict. At the regional level, the Moravian Compromise, concluded in 1905, contained four provincial laws for the most pressing areas of friction and supposed to blunt the edges of Czech–German confl ict tensions. One of these was the lex Perek, which, in addition to the division of school authorities on the basis of nationality, introduced in § 20 the principle that a child should generally attend a school in whose language of instruction it was profi cient. On the basis of primary and secondary sources (contemporary Czech and German press, records of meetings of the regional assembly, fi les of the regional school board, decrees of the Supreme Administrative Court), the study analyses and interprets conditions in Brno, Olomouc, Moravská Ostrava, Vítkovice and Znojmo through the lens of Czech national activists. It covers the development from the mid-seventies of the nineteenth century after the issuance of the lex Perek and then demonstrates in specifi c cities that the struggle for a child in the cities under study did not end with the implementation of the law. URL: https://www.upjs.sk/filozoficka-fakulta/katedra-historie/10984/

The article is a commentary on and supplement to an autobiographical text written by a descendant of a family of Jewish industrialists active in Podgórze and Krakow in the nineteenth century. The Baruchs moved from supplies and trading to industrial operations. Although the factories producing fl our, bread and building materials operated in the Krakow area, they mainly supplied the city and the Austrian army stationed there. The family achieved a high social status, which was manifested during public ceremonies. International and local competition led them to abandon their industrial activity. URL: https://www.upjs.sk/filozoficka-fakulta/katedra-historie/10984/

This study follows the life of the merchant Reinhard of Reims, who moved to Prague in the 1390s and amassed significant property and a fair amount of political power due to his business activities. When the Hussite Revolution began, however, he had to leave Prague, and all his assets remaining in Bohemia were confiscated due to his political and religious beliefs. Like many other Prague merchants, he found a new home in Wroclaw, Silesia, a major hub for international trade. Reinhard continued to conduct his trade from exile in Wroclaw, taking part in the retrieval of valuables from abandoned Czech monasteries and other activities of exiles from Bohemia. After a peace was reached and Emperor Sigismund took the Czech throne, Reinhard achieved the restitution of some of his confiscated property.

Based on fragmentally preserved sources as well as existing literature related to the topic (especially regional historiography, art history and historic preservation), the present study sets Marian plague columns into a broader context. Through the comparison of two minor East-Bohemian towns of a comparable population, it follows the factors playing a signifi cant role in the creation of complex Baroque sculptural compositions. At the same time, it aims to identify the functions that the sculptures were to fulfi l through their position in the public space. In this sense the study is inspired by the classic essay by Peter Burke called Conspicuous consumption in seventeenth-century Italy, which considers “the consumption” to be a specifi c form of communication. The composition of Marian plague columns can be perceived as an undeniable form of communication. From multiple perspectives, the article documents the key determinants, which are sometimes rather surprising, infl uencing the choice of partial components of the sculptural compositions as well as their overall impression – the communicative intention. Both Marian plague columns, to this day the most important monuments decorating the public space of the towns in question, are therefore approached in an interdisciplinary way especially in the context of the history of the towns, their manors and the East-Bohemian region. Therefore, the religious situation of both towns and their surroundings is not overlooked either. With regard to the fact that Jaroměř and Polička have been royal dowry towns, the Marian plague columns also refl ect the relation to the Bohemian queen, which is expressed verbally as inscriptions on them. In particular, the artwork in Polička and the events related to its creation importantly signalize the “conspicuous consumption”.