Aira Võsa presents a paper on religious crises at the Czech Academy of Science

On 10 May 2023, a participating researcher in the project (PRG1926) and senior researcher at the Under and Tuglas Literature Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences presented a paper entitled “Religious Crises in Early Modern Livonia: Texts and Contexts”, at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Science.

In the early modern period, Livonia was hit by a series of religious crises or depressions, accompanied by political and ecclesiastical changes. Religious crises in this context can be interpreted as the transformation of a clerically homogeneous and stable situation into an unstable one, deviations from the normative practices of piety, or the pluralism that replaced the monopolistic status of a single denomination. The outgrowth from these presuppositions was the theological-polemical literature that is the focus of the planned presentation. In particular, it will look at the texts of Livonian authors who were motivated by the Counter-Reformation, superstition, syncretism, spiritualism and pietism.

The presentation is under the auspices of a joint project of the Under and Tuglas Literary Centre of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences entitled “Literary Representations of Early Modern Crisis in Central and North Eastern Europe” (2021–2023).