Přehled o publikaci

Heresy, or religious otherness, was a major threat to medieval society because it was seen as a threat to Christian unity, which played a fundamental role in the minds of medieval people. Since the time of St Augustine, heretics were considered enemies of Christ and members of the civitatis diaboli, in opposition to Augustine's civitatis dei. Although the heresies of St. Augustine's time differed in many ways from the heretical movements of the later Middle Ages, his conclusions on the subject retained their relevance even at the end of the Middle Ages, when they were considered a basic interpretive starting point. The way in which St. Augustine spoke of the Manichaeans and other so-called heretical movements of late antiquity had a profound influence on the work of medieval chroniclers. The otherness of medieval heretics was not only evidenced by their different creeds, lifestyles, or patterns of behavior, but also by specific descriptions of their dying. The descriptions of heretics' deaths in medieval chronicles were often highly symbolic and used or referred to a number of topoi associated with heretics in the Middle Ages. The present paper focuses on sources from the setting of medieval Silesia and, on this basis, explores how medieval stereotypes associated with heretical movements were reflected in the narrative strategies of Silesian chroniclers, particularly in relation to Hussitism, which represented a major threat to Silesian society in the late Middle Ages. Hussitism was clearly the dominant heresy with which Silesian society had to contend, which is well evident from contemporary Silesian chronicles. The present study focuses in particular on the question of how medieval authors described the death of a heretic. The author concludes that the death of a heretic in narrative sources was often described in symbolic terms as a "bad" death, and medieval chroniclers deliberately constructed it in opposition to the ideal of ars moriendi.