The Latin School (1516–1627)
In the 16th century, Latin schools in Western Bohemia operated only in Jáchymov, Horní Slavkov, and Cheb. In Jáchymov, a Trivial (primary) School was founded in 1516, teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic. Under the leadership of rector Stephan Roth (after 1520), it developed into a Latin school that prepared students for university study. The school was led by rectors. A cantor and teachers (2–3, sometimes more) taught here, almost all of whom came from Saxony. During the school’s more than one hundred years of existence, 24 rectors and 25 cantors, preceptors, and organists worked here and gradually created a centre of humanism and Lutheranism.
Latin was the primary subject taught; students learned to read Latin authors, speak Latin, and compose poetry. Older boys also learned Greek (the Department of Greek at Prague University was only opened in 1540!). Students performed Latin comedies in the original, and later also Greek tragedies. From 1532, at Mathesius’s instigation, the Lutheran Catechism began to be taught. Practical subjects and the teaching of German were completely absent from the curriculum; knowledge of these was acquired at universities.
Emphasis was placed on moral education: children were frequently encouraged to display good morals, discipline, honesty, and obedience; they were to study in the name of God so that they could one day serve people. Vocal and instrumental music was practiced every day under the direction of the cantor and composer Niklas Herman. The student choir sang in the church for practically every service, and the school choir played a privileged role in the liturgy. Twice a week, the singing students went around the town and, with the help of the cantor, collected donations. The students‘ regular singing in the streets served not only to spread hymns among the inhabitants, but also for spiritual solace. The school choir’s participation at funerals was important, as the students‘ singing expressed the community’s relationship to the deceased. The choir’s participation every year in the middle of the Lenten period was essential. The Jáchymov children sang as they marched through the streets and symbolically drove the Pope out of the city:
Now we drive the Pope out
from Christ’s church and God’s house,
where he has ruled murderously
and led countless souls astray.
Students from Jáchymov can be found at almost all German universities: in Wittenberg, Leipzig, Heidelberg, Tübingen, Erfurt, Altdorf, Ingolstadt, Strasbourg, and Dillingen. In the years 1520–1602, 139 students from Jáchymov attended Wittenberg University. The proportion of Jáchymov students in Leipzig was almost as high during the same period. In contrast, Prague was not attractive; humanism was not widely practiced there, and at that time there was no place for Germans.
Women in Jáchymov
The deepening of religious life was accompanied by an internalisation and refinement of family life, whose ideal centre was the mother. Women and girls played a prominent role in domestic piety, teaching and ensuring the preservation of faith in households. They not only learned hymns but were able to meditate upon them, at the same time they also listened to, read, and sang God’s word, thus comforting not only themselves but also their neighbours. The Lutheran women of Jáchymov even astonished the clergy. It was the success of Lutheranism among the women of Jáchymov that caused the firm entrenchment of the Reformation in the valley.
Women managed to assert themselves, for example, Barbara Uthmann, the wife of a wealthy mining lord from Annaberg, introduced lacemaking around 1561, and this craft, which was initially practised by women and children as a sideline, became a significant and lucrative source of income at the right time.
In Jáchymov, there was also a girls‘ school from 1529. During Hermann’s time, the school was led by Katharina Held and later (around 1584) by Agnes Prager. The same ideals that animated the Latin school applied to the girls‘ school. Although the girls did not learn Latin, the curriculum consisted of the teaching of the Catechism and the Holy Scriptures. Herman composed German hymns for the girls that formulated the foundations of Lutheran teaching, as well as Lutheran social and political ideals.
In general, prosperity and the new teaching on the vanity of good deeds led to bodily intemperance, which came under fire in the valley just as in Germany. Mathesius had to state that even women were obsessed with drinking. „Even women are addicted to beer and drink everything that is on the table, and roll about on it like peasant women. Girls no longer want just to sip and slurp, but they also learn to drink, guzzle and sing.“ At other times, he complains that they drink beer together, enjoy themselves, go for walks, visit the hot spa (Karlovy Vary) and in the meantime leave the poor husband at home… It also happened that women played cards and, in high spirits, washed their feet in wine. Girls were criticised for „preferring dancing to sermons, for going out at night to the hustle and bustle of the town and returning home with their young companions without lanterns and without their mother, and for loving to go to the hot spa (Karlovy Vary) and tossing away their garlands.