Catholic Confirmation Books in Czech Dioceses in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries: An Unpublished Source for the Study of the Sacrament of Confirmation

Abstract

Catholic confirmation books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have survived in a number of Czech dioceses from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They represent a valuable but thus far largely overlooked source of information about how the Tridentine form of the rite of confirmation was established in a predominantly non-Catholic environment. The qualitative and quantitative character of the surviving confirmation books varies considerably, depending on how the Tridentine form of this sacrament was introduced in the re-Catholicized territories and whether the rite of confirmation was a means or more an outcome of the re-Catholicization process. This article outlines the initial stages of research and deals with confirmation books in the territory of five Czech dioceses. It assesses how many confirmation books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have survived, in what state, and what information they provide, before tracing the factors that influenced how confirmation was introduced into religious practice and spread in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.