Page:Lectures on The Historians of Bohemia by Count Lutzow (1905).djvu/74

 end of the sixteenth century, and was the joint work of several divines of the Brotherhood.

Brother Blahoslav was a very prominent member of the community. According to Dr. Jireček, who has published an interesting study of him, Blahoslav was born at Přerov, in Moravia, in 1523, of a family that was probably of noble descent. Early in life he visited Wittenberg and attended Luther’s sermons. Their influence on him seems to have been very great, as he became a member of that section of the Brotherhood which was in close touch with the German Reformers. During a later journey Blahoslav also met Melanchthon, who, we are told, ‘made many inquiries concerning Bohemian matters.’ He afterwards settled as one of the divines of his community at Mladá Boleslav in Bohemia, and here began to work at his history of the Brotherhood. Towards the end of his life he became a superior, or, as they were sometimes called, bishop, of his community, and continued his indefatigable labours up to 1571, when he died at Krumlov, while on a journey of inspection. Though only fragments of Blahoslav’s great historical work remain, some of his writings have been preserved, but as they are not of a historical character they require no notice here.

I shall on the other hand now mention a work that was long attributed to Blahoslav. The authorship of the book entitled The Life of Jan Augusta has given rise to one of those controversies which are almost inevitable when—as was the case in Bohemia—an almost forgotten literature is rediscovered after a lapse of two centuries. It was formerly believed that The Life of Jan Augusta was a work of Blahoslav, and