Der Konvertit und Exulant Jiří Holík und seine antikatholischen Schriften

The paper deals with the life and activities of Jiří František Holík, who came from a non-Roman Catholic Bohemian family. His education was nevertheless entrusted to the Jesuits and he eventually became a member of the Dominican Order, where he worked as a censor. In 1666 he escaped to Zittau, after which he tried to work as a Lutheran preacher, studied in Wittenberg and was granted the favour of Protestant theologians and nobility. His activity as a preacher and his eff orts to acquire a position was however unsuccessful, coming up against mistrust regarding his past. He therefore left for Prussian Königsberg and eventually settled in Riga, where he became known mainly as the author of books on fruit growing which were reprinted a number of times over the next fi fty years. However, while working in Saxony he also published several strongly anti-Catholic oriented works in German about the persecution of non-Catholics in Bohemia, and one in Swedish published in Uppsala. The last of these polemical works came out in 1679 in Amsterdam. The paper summarises all previously known information about these writings, which today survive only in single copies, and serves as an introduction to further detailed examination. It is clear that all the works are similar and moreover derive from Comenius' Historie o těžkých protivenstvích (The History of the Bohemian Persecution), in some cases appropriating not only information but even entire passages. In spite of the fact that Jiří Holík's anti-Catholic writings defi nitely do not qualify as impartial documentation of the situation after the Battle of the White Mountain and developments in Bohemia, they present unusually interesting evidence concerning the intellectual world of an exile and convert trying to fi nd a role and some support for himself in his new situation.