Department of Comenius Studies and Early Modern Intellectual History

The study of the life and work of Johannes Amos Comenius, a leading figure in the history of Czech science and culture, has a significant position in the field of research activities focused on the early modern period.

The history of the current department dates back to the early 1990s, when part of the team, formerly based at the Institute of Education, moved to the restored Institute of Philosophy. However, the continuity of interdisciplinary research on Comenius's life and work and editorial activities within the Academy of Sciences dates back to the mid-1950s. The current team thus builds on the work of some of the outstanding scholars in the field working in the Academy of Sciences, such as Jan Patočka, Antonín Škarka and Julie Nováková.

At present, the Comenius Department of the Institute of Philosophy of the CAS is the only department in the Czech Republic that is systematically devoted to the legacy of Comenius, both in the field of editing and interpretation. In particular, the long-term project of a critical edition of the entire work of J. A. Comenius (The Works of Jan Amos Comenius – J. A. Comenii Opera omnia) is one of those tasks of Czech science and culture that can only be successfully addressed by a specialised team supported by the CAS. An important part of the work of the department is also the publication of Comenius' works in translation, especially those that are unknown and those whose translation has become obsolete. The department also deals with the history of Comenius studies, a field devoted to the history of research on Comenius and its important representatives.

An integral part of the department's activities is research on the intellectual history of the early modern period, such as scholarly correspondence networks, the transfer of Melanchthonian natural philosophy, humanism in the Czech lands, encyclopedic projects in Central Europe, early modern historiography in relation to empirical epistemology, transcultural transfers in early modern culture, metaphors of knowledge, and Greek poetry in the Czech lands in the early modern period. The department publishes the international journal Acta Comeniana.

The department maintains contacts with many domestic and foreign scientific institutions (among others, University of Oxford, Stanford University, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen, Die Comenius-Forschungsstelle, etc.) that deal with Comenius's work and the history of the early modern period, especially the field of cultural history, from many countries (Colombia, Estonia, Germany, Great Britain, Japan, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Spain, Sweden, the USA, etc.).