| Summary: | The escalation of confessional dissents in Europe prior to the Thirty Years’ War was not restricted to living actors of the religious political struggles, but affected the realm of the diseased in the form of systematic negation of alternative Christian burial culture. The elementary problem of burying the deceased, which was generated by the coexistence of supporters of various religions, was the issue of using old burial sites, i.e. sites from the pre-Reformation time. This problem gained strength during the escalation of confessional disputes. These frequently brought about permanent or temporary downfall of mixed Catholic - non-Catholic graveyards, provided they appeared in the particular location. Pre-White Mountain Moravia, i.e. a country renown for its unique religious tolerance, favoured interconfessional tolerance towards burying the deceased, though the proportion and limits of it depended on the individual estates and towns. However, even here the breaking time in terms of burying the deceased was the break of the 16th and 17th centuries connected with escalation of religious frictions. The circumstances of funerals in the confessionally divided milieu at the time of dramatic escalation of religious frictions can be observed with almost a model plasticity in one of the two political centres of Moravia, i.e. the royal city of Brno. In 1600, the Brno citizens were forbidden to bury Protestants at the St. James’s parish church. Burying non-Catholics, who formed the majority of the population, became one of the hottest issues of local history in the following years. In the essay, the author discloses in detail the functions of individual institutions which were involved in conflicts between supporters of the existing and the new norms of the burial culture. He tries to define the roles and strategies of Cardinal Dietrichstein, the city priest Jan Chenetius, the supreme organ of the city local government, the commune, craft corporations and individual citizens who were involved in the burial disputes. On ...
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