Fragments from the Lost Hymnal of Tobiáš Závorka in the Municipal Library of Szarvas

Abstract

Recently, during the restoration of a 1614 Wittenberg Latin sermon volume in the Municipal Library of Szarvas (Tessedik Sámuel Múzeum és Szárazmalom, Városi Könyvtár Régi Gyűjtemény), fragments of printed texts in Czech and German were found in the binding. The Czech text fragments are partly prose texts and partly excerpts from hymns with musical notation. The prose passages are taken from a preface to Tobiáš Závorka’s hymnal Písně chvál božských..., but cannot be identified with complete accuracy in the surviving Prague editions of 1602/1606 and 1606. From the information in the fragment, it is reasonable to assume that it may have been part of an earlier unknown edition of Tobiáš Závorka’s Písně chvál Božských…, which went out of print twenty-five years after one of Kunvaldský’s hymnbooks, and five years before the known printed copies (1602/1606, 1606). The printing process suggests that the fragment was produced at the same time as the first edition of Písně chvál Božských… in 1602. In 1602, the printer, Jiřík Jakubův Dačický, was arrested. The printing was then interrupted and was not completed until 1606. In the same year, the complete hymnal was republished. It is reasonable to assume that the fragment comes from the preface printed in 1602, which could not have been published then, because it was out of date in 1606. It was therefore scrapped and later reused for binding.