Sacred and Everyday: Christological Songs in Czech Popular Devotion (1700-1950)
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Requested lectures |
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| Description | This lecture explores Czech Christological broadside ballads as a long-lasting form of popular religious poetry transmitted between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries through print, manuscript, and oral tradition. Focusing on their oscillation between seemingly opposing poles—tradition and modernity, intimacy and reverence, the global and the local, orthodoxy and heterodoxy, and the sacred and the everyday—the presentation shows how these tensions shape both the poetics and the social functions of the songs. Special attention is paid to the reasons for their exceptional longevity and to their embedding in diverse liturgical and non-liturgical contexts such as pilgrimages, weddings, funeral vigils, and communal work. The paper also analyses the dynamic relationship between text and melody, highlighting the contrast between relative textual stability and high melodic variability in oral transmission. Methodologically, the contribution combines literary analysis with perspectives from ethnology and ethnomusicology and applies concepts of intermediality and reception. Christological broadside ballads are thus interpreted as a flexible medium of popular theology at the boundary between official doctrine and lived religious practice. |
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