Does the past have a hold on the present?

Plenary Session Hall (Jednací sál) in Valdštejnský palác.

    Yesterday Czechs, and many others, celebrated the seventieth anniversary of the end of the Second World War. Flags appeared everywhere, sticking out of cars’ windows, stuck on the front of trams, which is reminiscent of a college football gameday in the U.S., and which, come to think of it, may in fact more accurately reflect the flags’ purpose since the World Hockey Championship is happening in Prague.

     Some buildings, normally closed to the public, were opened in honor of the holiday. One such building was Valdštejn palace, where the Senate meets and works. I wish that visiting the palace in this way could have been part of my class’s global experience, because I would have liked to hear their thoughts on what kind of impact the history of the location might have on the workings of modern politics. For example, do senators look up at the Main Hall’s ceiling mural of Valdštejn as Mars, in true seventeenth-century metaphor, and think they are countering or fulfilling that vision? Or does the fact that the Plenary Session Hall (Jednací sál) was originally a horse stable allow for more humble thoughts of their work?

Main Hall ceiling mural of Valdštejnský palác

From England to Bohemia

I just finished From England to Bohemia: Heresy and Communication in the Later Middle Ages by Michael van Dussen.

The most interesting idea, to me, permeated the book and is captured here: "communication at this time was a contingent, localized practice, mediated and conditioned by ad hoc personal contact and documentary forms that were far from stable.  In a manuscript culture, the material conditions of communication and textual dissemination afforded authorities little advantage over the propagandizing projects of competitors, particularly when it came to crossing regnal boundaries, and particularly, too, when competitors laid mutual claim to authenticating modes and forms of documentation." (p. 127)

The idea that I wished was expanded on and discussed more explicitly: "Religious controversy was indeed a practice or fluid temporal process." (p. 39)