Hang him high: The elevation of Jánošík to an ethnic icon

In this paper, Martin Votruba traces the evolution of the Jánošík myth. The highwayman Jánošík is a living legend in Czech, Polish, and Slovak cultures. Contrary to common claims, the modern celebratory myth of the brigand hanged in the eighteenth century is at odds with the traditional images of brigandage in the western Carpathians. Folk songs and The Hungarian Simplicissimus of the seventeenth century often anathematize highway robbery. High literature of the mostly Slovak counties of the Kingdom of Hungary in the Habsburg empire similarly cast Jánošík as a criminal. Yet some intellectuals, such as Pavol Jozef Šafárik, inspired by the robber in German literature, singled out Jánošík from among other brigands and reduced that folklore-based opprobrium. Others, such as Ján Kollár, resisted Jánošík's rehabilitation. Subsequent Central European national revivals and ethnic activism prompted the Slovak romantic poets to reinvent Jánošík as a folk rebel against social and ethnic oppression

LEBEN JESU: PICTORIAL MEDITATIONS AND THE TRANSFORMATIONS OF THE SELF IN THE CONVENTS OF LATE MEDIEVAL GERMANY

This dissertation attends to one of the central problems of medieval art history: the role of images in private devotion. Despite all the scholarly attention paid to devotional art, we understand very little of how images were used in meditation.⁠ To reconstruct the past devotional experience of people, this study takes a new, ethical-therapeutic approach with the case study of a group of fifteenth-century illuminated manuscripts, copied and used by religious women of reformed communities. The Leben Jesu manuscripts contain a key work of late medieval spirituality and are adorned with simple image cycles of Jesus’s life, painted by professional workshops. Through an analysis of antique and medieval philosophical writings, meditational manuals, devotional tracts, and images of meditation, the study shows that the Leben Jesu’s spiritual program builds upon sophisticated theories of the soul, the psychological mechanisms of meditation, and a distinctly late medieval ideal of human perfectibility. Retaining the therapeutic vocabulary of these traditions, the Leben Jesu presents the devotee’s spiritual transformation as a healing process for her sick soul, aided by Christus medicus, the epitome of all virtues. The ultimate aim of meditation was to prompt the devotee to internalize the moral subject of her immersion and, eventually, to guide her life along those principles. With the analysis of the cognitive technique of visualization, the underlying method of the Leben Jesu’s meditation, the dissertation shows how the devotee used images to bring about her spiritual perfection. After exploring the basics of visualization as presented in ancient rhetorical theories and medieval meditational manuals, the study examines the specific mechanisms built in the Leben Jesu to prompt this cognitive process. The Leben Jesu manuscripts attest that image cycles, far from being the Bible of the illiterate, as they have been often characterized, were finely crafted tools that brought Jesus’s noble example to life for the medieval reader-viewer and commanded her to engage in a rigorous transformation of the self. Painting her heart with Jesus’s life, the Leben Jesu healed the devotee’s soul and facilitated her spiritual perfection