House, home and neighborhood on the eve of White Mountain: Material culture and daily life in the new city of Prague, 1547-1611

This dissertation presents a study of material culture and daily life in Prague in the sixty-year period preceding the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Initiated by the establishment of the residence of the Habsburg Viceroy, in 1548, and the arrival of the imperial court of Rudolf II, in 1583, Prague underwent a transformation from a small city on the Eastern border of the Holy Roman Empire to the largest city in all of Central Europe, and a major center of late Renaissance culture.;This dissertation provides a new vantage point on which to view this transformation; the major theme of the city during this period--the tension between the castle and the city; and one of the major problem areas--the extent to which attempts at political centralization exercised by the early Habsburg rulers of Bohemia served as a unifying cultural force in the capital city.;By using a methodological approach which combines aspects of structural history, social cultural history and urban politics, the dissertation examines the transformation of a core section of the city within the context of the transformation of the city as a whole. The starting point of the dissertation is the structural reconstruction of a section of the New City based on an in-depth analysis of probate inventories, building disputes, civic wills and marriage contracts (Part II). From this structural study, and supplemented by sources of a more qualitative nature, including records of religious orders, legal codes, travel diaries, and humanist didactic literature, the major text of the dissertation (Part I) studies the spatial-functional disposition of households, the physical renovation of houses and churches, interior design, acquisition of art and cultural objects, and a religious iconoclastic revolt.;The transformation of Prague into a Habsburg residential city is presented not as one but as a series of related transformations which introduced new ways of representing individual and community, and control over institutions and the landscape. Two major aspects of the transformation--the diffusion of Renaissance styles and a new approach to ecclesiastical material culture--although initiated from royal/imperial and noble circles, were not simply adopted by other groups, as is often presented in the literature, but appropriated in a distinctive manner which was informed by the multi-functional nature of the urban environment and local Hussite traditions.