Man, Values and the Dynamics of Medieval Society: Anthropological Concepts of the Middle Ages in a Transcultural Perspective by Tomas Petráček, and: Church, Society and Change: Christianity Impaired by Conflicting Elites by Tomas Petráček, and: In the Maelstrom of Secularization, Collaboration, and Persecution: Roman Catholicism in Modern Czech Society and the State by Tomas Petráček (review)

Tomas Petráček is a leading historian of the Czech Republic, teaching in the Department of Cultural and Religious Studies in the Faculty of Education of the University of Hradec Králove. Here he publishes three matching volumes covering the sweep of Czech church history. The first—Man, Values and the Dynamics of Medieval Society: Church Society and Change—is rooted in the contemporary problem of globalization and wonders whether the past, specifically the medieval experience of diversity and solidarity, can provide any guidance for the problems we now face. The book explores medieval anthropology and the relation between Church and society, with further chapters on such subjects as the medieval Inquisition. Medieval civilization becomes a starting point for meditation on categories such as culture, tradition, identity, and multiculturalism (defined as “a plurality of noncommunicating ghettos” [p. 10]). The goal is a Christian universalism in which the various cultural traditions are stripped of any ultimacy they might claim, finding rather legitimacy within a family of cultures. Throughout the volumes, translation into English, if less than elegant, sometimes can be amusing, as when, also on page 10, we are told, “The individual does not escape into new cultures in Christianity, but steps up into it with one foot while the other foot remains firmly planted.” The second chapter of this volume describes the influence of Christianity on medieval culture. The third chapter focuses on a cluster of themes ordered around the question of the perception of human fate. The fourth and fifth chapters use St. Thomas Aquinas to explore the relation between norms and society, and the sixth turns to the medieval Inquisition. This chapter does a particularly good job of explaining the differences between the social necessities bearing on medieval and modern societies that led to, in the medieval case, one way of setting boundaries, and in the modern, other ways. The seventh chapter considers medieval poverty and social assistance. Especially a number of linguistic matters such as the unending variety of language, varying from village to village, are very well put.

The second volume of this trilogy—Church Society and Change: Christianity Impaired by Conflicting Elites—traces Western Christianity through the Peace of Westphalia. The analysis, with the repetitiveness also found in the other volumes, centers on the ability of the Catholic Church to come to terms with the change brought by the Protestant Reformation leading, it is claimed, to the ultimate secularization of society. We find such characterizations as “a neurotic … society” (p. 34).

The third volume of the trilogy—In the Maelstrom of Secularization, Collaboration, and Persecution: Roman Catholicism in Modern Czech Society and the State—treats the often traumatic modern history of the Bohemian Lands (Bohemia, Moravia, and Austrian Silesia) in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It aims to provide general reflections on the secularization of these Lands, by which is meant “a mass departure from religious practice in organized churches in this country compared with all its central European neighbours … with the possible exception of the former German Democratic Republic” (p. 7). Then occurs a summary chapter on medieval and early-modern times, looking for...