Earlier 18th-century printed book production in Czech could be described as largely a mixture of devotional writing, including religious verse, hymns and sermons - some highly cultivated and well-crafted - , also popular verses, and further popular reading matter, and it was limited in many ways, though still very much following in the path of a considerable Roman Catholic Baroque tradition.
Now a new era was starting to evolve, what we may somewhat glibly call the modern era of Czech national society, culture and politics. The end of the pre-Revival period is signalled by a number of radical Habsburg state initiatives.
Textbooks were free, but parents were expected to pay fees. By a large proportion of children in the Bohemian Lands were attending primary schools though at first boys formed the bulk of them, girls were not excluded.
German was taught to all, and required for entering secondary schools and higher education where German had now replaced Latin , but these primary schools also began to produce general literacy in Czech, as well as effecting a wider educational transformation. At least from the seventeenth century, Germans are acutely conscious of their lack, and develop a kind of inferiority complex which explains much of the later course of German literary history Their position of weakness compels them to emulate and imitate foreign literatures Then eventually, by an impulse which only appears to be of a different kind, there is an insistence on original German-ness Malcolm Pasley, , 2nd edition, , p.
Substitute Czech for German and the statement still rings true, even if it took longer for major authors of imaginative writing to arrive on the scene. The late eighteenth century in Czech is a time of scholarship and busy writerly activity rather than a source of literary masterpieces.
