Hmotná kultura a projevy mentality venkovské společnosti (Jižní Čechy, 17.-18. století)

The text focuses on the problem of the material culture of the village in the seventeenth and eighteenth century. However, the main goal was not to reconstruct the complete material furnishings of the village homestead. This represents just one of the possible ways for approaching the inner spiritual life of the village population. The text is based on the empirical research of the archival sources. The archival information was subsequently confronted with the results of older scientific works with the same objectives. The text is composed as a case study based on the sources coming from four dominions of South Bohemia (Třeboň, Hluboká nad Vltavou, Protivín and Orlík nad Vltavou). As a main point of departure from the point of view of the heuristic were used inheritance inventories, supplemented by documents from the area of criminal law. From the point of view of the method, the work can be classified as microhistory. It makes use especially of the reflexive approaches of historical anthropology; in the realm of theory, it draws upon the “history from below” concepts. Even though the text is not apurely regional study, the authors do not aim to generalizations in the first place. They are well aware of the fact that the validity of some partial information cannot be carried over mechanically to other ethnographical areas.