The religious world of late medieval and early modern Central Europe is complicated, convoluted and, above, all entangled. But despite the real and tangible connections that linked the various polities of this region together, scholars have tended to explore this landscape along anachronistic divisions defined narrowly by language and nation. This article, by contrast, examines connections that developed between the Bohemian and Austrian lands. It begins in the mid-fourteenth century by exploring rivalling efforts of Emperor Charles IV in Prague and his son-in-law, Duke Rudolf IV of Austria, to build the institutional foundations upon which critical ecclesiastical changes occurred in the following three centuries. The chapter traces parallel reform programmes in the fifteenth century that had very different outcomes. While Hussitism left Bohemia isolated, the efforts of Nicholas of Cusa and others helped to integrate the Austrian lands into the broader ecclesiastical culture of the West. The sixteenth century brought an Erasmian humanism to both regions as well as more radical expressions of reform. Protestantism reached its high point here in the late sixteenth century only to collapse dramatically a few decades later with the great crisis of the Thirty Years’ War. The chapter concludes with a comparison of the exiles who left this region after the Catholic victory.

From Late Antiquity onward many Homeric verses and phrases were considered to have a proverbial value and as such were employed as independent witty sayings. While the use of these Homeric proverbs in Byzantine writings has yet to be thoroughly investigated, in the early sixteenth century these expressions were gathered in paroemiographical collections. These include Erasmus’ Adagia and Arsenios Apostolis’ Violarium, two works which seem to be interdependent in this respect. Apostolis copied many Homeric verses and their accompanying scholia into the margins of Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, gr. 3058, with the intention to add another section to the four existing typologies (proverbs, maxims, apothegms and anecdotes). In doing so, he explored and exploited available sources, such as the Commentaries on Homer by Eustathios of Thessalonike. The criteria according to which Apostolis organized the proverbs, as well as his creation of a separate section on Homeric proverbial verses, were innovations in Greek literature. This chapter explores the textual relationship between Apostolis’ compilation and the long exegetical tradition on Homer. More particularly, it will demonstrate how Eustathios’ works were preserved and adapted to the expectations of a new era.

This chapter focuses on Hugo Grotius and the light he sheds on the relation between metaphysical debates about the freedom of the will and political debates about freedom.