Veronika Čapská
As a scholar, I am particularly interested in the intersection of history and cultural anthropology. I currently serve as the Vice Dean for International Relations at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, in Prague. I am a Senior Scholar at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. In the academic year 2018–2019 I was a Visiting Fellow at the University of Cambridge, Trinity Hall. Between 2015 and 2021 I served as the Editor-In-Chief of the peer-reviewed academic journal Dejiny-Teorie-Kritika/ History-Theory-Criticism which is published by the Faculty of Humanities of the Charles University in Prague: http://www.dejinyteoriekritika.cz. I have turned the journal bilingual (English-Czech) and I have achieved its indexing in the Scopus Elsevier database. Between September and December 2022 I was a Visiting Scholar at the Faculty of History, University of Cambridge. I am a member of the Oxford and Cambridge Alumni Society, Czech Republic.
My past book projects have included critical editions of early modern German ego-documents and I have published broadly in international academic journals, including the European Review of History/ Revue européenne dʼhistoire, Austrian History Yearbook and Saeculum – Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte. I have also served as a book proposal reviewer for Oxford University Press. My fields of specialization include (trans)cultural history; translation history; gift exchange; gender and women’s history; history of migration, exile, and diasporas; history of religion and asceticism; theory of history.
My ORCID is https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3235-6426
I welcome inquiries from prospective doctoral students interested in working in the fields of early modern transcultural history (gift exchange and patronage, translation history, history of mobilities, correspondence networks), early modern personal writing, print culture, visual and material culture and related areas.
My past book projects have included critical editions of early modern German ego-documents and I have published broadly in international academic journals, including the European Review of History/ Revue européenne dʼhistoire, Austrian History Yearbook and Saeculum – Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte. I have also served as a book proposal reviewer for Oxford University Press. My fields of specialization include (trans)cultural history; translation history; gift exchange; gender and women’s history; history of migration, exile, and diasporas; history of religion and asceticism; theory of history.
My ORCID is https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3235-6426
I welcome inquiries from prospective doctoral students interested in working in the fields of early modern transcultural history (gift exchange and patronage, translation history, history of mobilities, correspondence networks), early modern personal writing, print culture, visual and material culture and related areas.
less
Related Authors
InterestsView All (19)
Uploads
Books by Veronika Čapská
My doctoral thesis focuses on the mendicant order of Servites (Servants of Mary) that originated in 13th century Tuscany and underwent an exceptionally vital growth in the Habsburg monarchy in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. Rather than conceiving of the Servite order as an institution I regard it as a sacred imagined community. Since the religious orders have traditionally placed more emphasis on the community as a whole than on its individuals I utilize the concept elaborated by the American social scientist Benedict Anderson which allows me to analyse the Servites as a group of people who often did not know one another personally but who shared their identity and objectives. I explore the ways the Servites shaped their imagination of themselves as a community and of their past for the sake of attaining the future. I analyse the rhetorical and visual strategies the order developed and employed in order to advance its role in the Habsburg project of re-establishing Catholicism in Central Europe.
The theatrical elements that are so pervasively present in the baroque culture lead me to employ the concept of self-representation of the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman who conceived the self-representation as a model of everyday social life of all individuals. The expansion as well as material subsistence of religious orders in general, and mendicant orders in particular, was largely dependent on attaining potential members and benefactors and accordingly on the favourable presentation of their ideals.
The question of self-representation is closely connected with the issue of self-concept of the order. The notion of the contemporaries and the Servites themselves about the order differed profoundly from the later classical image of the order which is the result of the empirical historiography and in its concise version it is presented in the main encyclopaedia devoted to the religious orders (e.g. by M. Heimbucher, G. Rocca−G. Pellicia; D. Foltýn, M. Buben etc.). In the doctoral thesis I employ a wide range of previously disregarded sources (especially visual and narrative) and strive to eliminate the former disproportion between the schematic image provided by encyclopaedic handbooks and the period self-representation of the Servites themselves.
I regard the Servite narrative texts and images to be at the core of the community’s collective imagination. My interpretation of the Servite narrative texts is based on the typology of emplotment structuring developed by the Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye and I explore the ways in which the Servites participated in the grand narrative of the triumphant Habsburg piety (Pietas Austriaca).
North of the Alps the Servites developed a very distinctive style of self-representation which closely intertwined the rhetoric of the Habsburg and Servite devotion. The order could demonstrate its special ties to the Habsburg dynasty also by visual means as it was awarded the privilege to use its own coat of arms in combination with the red-white-red shield of the Austrian archdukes. The rise of typographic techniques gave the religious orders an influential instrument of self-promotion of a more lasting quality than e.g. an oral sermon or pilgrimage festivity could have provided. Moreover the printed texts as well as devotional graphics could easily serve as gifts creating or strengthening social ties. However the upswing of new media also brought higher requirements for the elaborate programs of self-representation.
Unlike the newly emerged early modern religious orders, the Servite order could take advantage of its medieval heritage. One of the most ambitious expressions of Servite baroque historicism was the narrative construction of Philip Benizi, the 13th century patron saint of the order, as a counsellor and confessor of the founding father of the Habsburg dynasty, Rudolf I. of Habsburg. Saint Philip Benizi was thus presented as ‘the first teacher of the Habsburg virtue which overcomes the enemies’. The invention of the medieval connection between the order and the reigning dynasty was intended to prefigure the early modern Habsburg – Servite alliance and had a clear political connotation.
However the imagined past and the new forms of devotion also brought the Servite order into conflicts with other old mendicant orders of medieval origin, especially the Friars Minor, the Dominicans and the Carmelites who clearly viewed the Servites as increasingly active intruders in the domain of activity of mendicant religious.
Throughout the whole thesis I argue that the Servites employed the narrative schemes of romance to develop the idea of a knightly fight of the members of the order for the Habsburg „regnum marianum“ and conceived their participation in the project of the confessional homogenization of the monarchy in terms of the courtly service to Virgin Mary. The narrative structures provided the Servite interpretation of the Habsburg recatholization project with dynamics and corresponded with the triumphant tone of the master narrative of the victory of Habsburg virtue. The powerful system of the Servite self-representation played a vital role in gaining the favour of the loyal ascending nobility and enabled the order to build a network of thirty monasteries in East-Central Europe consisting mainly of houses at Marian shrines, thus imprinting the landscape with the traces of the early modern Habsburg project of confessional homogenization of the monarchy,
Diarial Family Records (1785−1808)
(Summary)
The diarial family records written by Gabriela Sobková of Kornice, married of Spens- Booden (1773−1808), attracted the interest of the editors by their relation to the long overlooked transitional period of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the era of the late Enlightenment and emerging Proto-Romanticism. Gabriela spend her entire life in small family residences in a provincial part of the Habsburg monarchy − the region of Austrian Silesia with its complex ties to the various Central European centers (Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Wrocłav, Krakow, Olomouc). The text has thus seemed to be a very convenient point of departure for the research of a provincial noblewoman’s participation in the various forms of the European late Enlightenment. The editors, Veronika Čapská and Veronika Marková, approach the Enlightenment as a complex of cultural practices and as an educational project closely connected with the expansion of the reading public.
The present book makes available for the first time in an edition the German-written text by Gabriela Sobková which is preserved in the Regional Archive in Opava (Czech Republic) under the original title “Verschiedene Familiennotata”. The ego-document is of mixed genre character. It has a strictly diarial structure with practically every entry introduced with a precise datation. After Gabriela’s marriage to Emanuel of Spens-Booden in 1796 the character of the text as family records intensified as it formed the collective memory of the new family and Gabriela occasionally used her private notes while fulfilling her formal social duties. After Gabriela’s death in 1808 her husband Emanuel concluded her diary with his own two separate entries and thus strengthened its profile as family records.
The book includes the German edition of the diarial family records as well as Gabriela’s testament and the translation of both documents into Czech language. It also encompasses two accompanying studies written by Veronika Čapská and Veronika Marková respectively with the aim to place the edited sources into wider socio-cultural context.
Čapská focuses on the reading milieu of the young Gabriela as she started to write her diarial records at the chateau of her grandfather Karl Traugott Skrbenský of Hříště in Hošťálkovy (Gotschdorf) in Austrian Silesia. Karl Traugott was a local patron of music and visual arts and he substantially enlarged the family book collections. During Gabriela’s stay at her grandfather’s the chateau library was richly supplied with the recent literature for the education and the distraction of young ladies, including a large amount of the novels of sensibility. The majority of literature was obtained from important international centers of the book market, such as Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Leipzig, Wrocłav or Amsterdam.
The domestic project of the cultivation of virtue, empathy and sociability was the chief stream of the Enlightenment culture that found its way to the rural residences of the marginal noble families in the peripheral parts of Europe. It was exactly this form of the Enlightenment that Gabriela was able to participate in and to transmit to her offspring.
Marková pays close attention to the family background of Gabriela and to the dominance of the family memory and identity over the personal introspection in her records. Gabriela was born into the old Silesian noble family Sobek of Kornice. Due to the financial difficulties of her father Jan Karel count Sobek of Kornice she spent her childhood and youth at the residence of her maternal grandparents in Hošťálkovy (Gotschdorf) and later at the chateau at her mother’s estate in Vysoká (Weissack) in Austrian Silesia. Gabriela’s husband Emanuel of Spens-Booden (1773−1828) was a member of an originally Scottish noble family, whose one lineage settled in the Silesian duchy of Teschen in the seventeenth century.
Gabriela writes about herself only exceptionally and relates herself closely to the social network of her family. She thus identifies herself as the daughter, wife, mother and a noble woman with the dominant social ties in the Austrian Silesia. The image of Gabriela as a virtuous woman fulfilling all her duties was fostered by the words of her husband at the last pages of the family records and it could be seen as a sign of an emerging burgher ideal of family relations.
While on the pages of her diary Gabriela actively shaped the family memory, in the text of her testament she did not make use of the possibility to determine the inheritance portions for her children, and thus left the initiative in the financial matters entirely on her husband.
Papers by Veronika Čapská
My doctoral thesis focuses on the mendicant order of Servites (Servants of Mary) that originated in 13th century Tuscany and underwent an exceptionally vital growth in the Habsburg monarchy in the course of the 17th and 18th centuries. Rather than conceiving of the Servite order as an institution I regard it as a sacred imagined community. Since the religious orders have traditionally placed more emphasis on the community as a whole than on its individuals I utilize the concept elaborated by the American social scientist Benedict Anderson which allows me to analyse the Servites as a group of people who often did not know one another personally but who shared their identity and objectives. I explore the ways the Servites shaped their imagination of themselves as a community and of their past for the sake of attaining the future. I analyse the rhetorical and visual strategies the order developed and employed in order to advance its role in the Habsburg project of re-establishing Catholicism in Central Europe.
The theatrical elements that are so pervasively present in the baroque culture lead me to employ the concept of self-representation of the Canadian sociologist Erving Goffman who conceived the self-representation as a model of everyday social life of all individuals. The expansion as well as material subsistence of religious orders in general, and mendicant orders in particular, was largely dependent on attaining potential members and benefactors and accordingly on the favourable presentation of their ideals.
The question of self-representation is closely connected with the issue of self-concept of the order. The notion of the contemporaries and the Servites themselves about the order differed profoundly from the later classical image of the order which is the result of the empirical historiography and in its concise version it is presented in the main encyclopaedia devoted to the religious orders (e.g. by M. Heimbucher, G. Rocca−G. Pellicia; D. Foltýn, M. Buben etc.). In the doctoral thesis I employ a wide range of previously disregarded sources (especially visual and narrative) and strive to eliminate the former disproportion between the schematic image provided by encyclopaedic handbooks and the period self-representation of the Servites themselves.
I regard the Servite narrative texts and images to be at the core of the community’s collective imagination. My interpretation of the Servite narrative texts is based on the typology of emplotment structuring developed by the Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye and I explore the ways in which the Servites participated in the grand narrative of the triumphant Habsburg piety (Pietas Austriaca).
North of the Alps the Servites developed a very distinctive style of self-representation which closely intertwined the rhetoric of the Habsburg and Servite devotion. The order could demonstrate its special ties to the Habsburg dynasty also by visual means as it was awarded the privilege to use its own coat of arms in combination with the red-white-red shield of the Austrian archdukes. The rise of typographic techniques gave the religious orders an influential instrument of self-promotion of a more lasting quality than e.g. an oral sermon or pilgrimage festivity could have provided. Moreover the printed texts as well as devotional graphics could easily serve as gifts creating or strengthening social ties. However the upswing of new media also brought higher requirements for the elaborate programs of self-representation.
Unlike the newly emerged early modern religious orders, the Servite order could take advantage of its medieval heritage. One of the most ambitious expressions of Servite baroque historicism was the narrative construction of Philip Benizi, the 13th century patron saint of the order, as a counsellor and confessor of the founding father of the Habsburg dynasty, Rudolf I. of Habsburg. Saint Philip Benizi was thus presented as ‘the first teacher of the Habsburg virtue which overcomes the enemies’. The invention of the medieval connection between the order and the reigning dynasty was intended to prefigure the early modern Habsburg – Servite alliance and had a clear political connotation.
However the imagined past and the new forms of devotion also brought the Servite order into conflicts with other old mendicant orders of medieval origin, especially the Friars Minor, the Dominicans and the Carmelites who clearly viewed the Servites as increasingly active intruders in the domain of activity of mendicant religious.
Throughout the whole thesis I argue that the Servites employed the narrative schemes of romance to develop the idea of a knightly fight of the members of the order for the Habsburg „regnum marianum“ and conceived their participation in the project of the confessional homogenization of the monarchy in terms of the courtly service to Virgin Mary. The narrative structures provided the Servite interpretation of the Habsburg recatholization project with dynamics and corresponded with the triumphant tone of the master narrative of the victory of Habsburg virtue. The powerful system of the Servite self-representation played a vital role in gaining the favour of the loyal ascending nobility and enabled the order to build a network of thirty monasteries in East-Central Europe consisting mainly of houses at Marian shrines, thus imprinting the landscape with the traces of the early modern Habsburg project of confessional homogenization of the monarchy,
Diarial Family Records (1785−1808)
(Summary)
The diarial family records written by Gabriela Sobková of Kornice, married of Spens- Booden (1773−1808), attracted the interest of the editors by their relation to the long overlooked transitional period of the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the era of the late Enlightenment and emerging Proto-Romanticism. Gabriela spend her entire life in small family residences in a provincial part of the Habsburg monarchy − the region of Austrian Silesia with its complex ties to the various Central European centers (Vienna, Berlin, Prague, Wrocłav, Krakow, Olomouc). The text has thus seemed to be a very convenient point of departure for the research of a provincial noblewoman’s participation in the various forms of the European late Enlightenment. The editors, Veronika Čapská and Veronika Marková, approach the Enlightenment as a complex of cultural practices and as an educational project closely connected with the expansion of the reading public.
The present book makes available for the first time in an edition the German-written text by Gabriela Sobková which is preserved in the Regional Archive in Opava (Czech Republic) under the original title “Verschiedene Familiennotata”. The ego-document is of mixed genre character. It has a strictly diarial structure with practically every entry introduced with a precise datation. After Gabriela’s marriage to Emanuel of Spens-Booden in 1796 the character of the text as family records intensified as it formed the collective memory of the new family and Gabriela occasionally used her private notes while fulfilling her formal social duties. After Gabriela’s death in 1808 her husband Emanuel concluded her diary with his own two separate entries and thus strengthened its profile as family records.
The book includes the German edition of the diarial family records as well as Gabriela’s testament and the translation of both documents into Czech language. It also encompasses two accompanying studies written by Veronika Čapská and Veronika Marková respectively with the aim to place the edited sources into wider socio-cultural context.
Čapská focuses on the reading milieu of the young Gabriela as she started to write her diarial records at the chateau of her grandfather Karl Traugott Skrbenský of Hříště in Hošťálkovy (Gotschdorf) in Austrian Silesia. Karl Traugott was a local patron of music and visual arts and he substantially enlarged the family book collections. During Gabriela’s stay at her grandfather’s the chateau library was richly supplied with the recent literature for the education and the distraction of young ladies, including a large amount of the novels of sensibility. The majority of literature was obtained from important international centers of the book market, such as Berlin, Paris, Vienna, Leipzig, Wrocłav or Amsterdam.
The domestic project of the cultivation of virtue, empathy and sociability was the chief stream of the Enlightenment culture that found its way to the rural residences of the marginal noble families in the peripheral parts of Europe. It was exactly this form of the Enlightenment that Gabriela was able to participate in and to transmit to her offspring.
Marková pays close attention to the family background of Gabriela and to the dominance of the family memory and identity over the personal introspection in her records. Gabriela was born into the old Silesian noble family Sobek of Kornice. Due to the financial difficulties of her father Jan Karel count Sobek of Kornice she spent her childhood and youth at the residence of her maternal grandparents in Hošťálkovy (Gotschdorf) and later at the chateau at her mother’s estate in Vysoká (Weissack) in Austrian Silesia. Gabriela’s husband Emanuel of Spens-Booden (1773−1828) was a member of an originally Scottish noble family, whose one lineage settled in the Silesian duchy of Teschen in the seventeenth century.
Gabriela writes about herself only exceptionally and relates herself closely to the social network of her family. She thus identifies herself as the daughter, wife, mother and a noble woman with the dominant social ties in the Austrian Silesia. The image of Gabriela as a virtuous woman fulfilling all her duties was fostered by the words of her husband at the last pages of the family records and it could be seen as a sign of an emerging burgher ideal of family relations.
While on the pages of her diary Gabriela actively shaped the family memory, in the text of her testament she did not make use of the possibility to determine the inheritance portions for her children, and thus left the initiative in the financial matters entirely on her husband.