Prague—An Urban Cosmos

Early modern Prague is best known through snapshot glimpses as the setting for the escapades of the English alchemist John Dee, Rudolf II’s exotic Kunstkammer, or the famous defenestration of Catholic councillors that sparked the Thirty Years’ War that ravaged Europe between 1618 and 1648. No continuous treatment of its social and cultural history across the seventeenth century exists. Moreover, Prague is often viewed through refracted categories: as a court city, a city of four administratively independent towns, a city of reform and protest prior to 1620, or a city of Baroque Catholic ascendancy after 1620. While delineating the social, cultural, and religious topography of Prague over a century, this profile presents a different perspective of a city that enabled a web of encounters between people of different social strata, faiths, and occupations, and fostered its own urban cosmos.