Historica Olomucensia

The bright star of Šternberk and Lažany. Woman, man and child in the funeral sermon over Maria Maximiliana Aurelia of Lažany from 1665

The funeral speech of Václav Plevňovský over Maria Maximiliana of Lažany, born of Šternberk, from 1665 is analysed in the context of the family commemorative strategies of the early modern nobility. Maria Maximiliana died a few days after delivery after a year marriage to Charles Maximilian of Lažany. A whole series of evidence testifies that the investor and inventor of the funeral speech (the part of which is an engraving of castrum doloris) was not her husband, but the members of her original family. The basic motif of the speech and the castrum doloris is the family coat of arms of the Šternberks, the eight-pointed star. The coat of arms of the husband's family or the name Lažany does not appear in the sermon, in the castrum doloris it appears very marginally. The biographical parts of the sermon almost ignore the marital status of the deceased - the virtues and deeds of Maria Maximiliana are not understood as a demonstration of the matrimonial virtues, the text also resigns to the depiction of the relations of the husband and wife and neither mentions the traditional catalogue of the virtues of a 'good wife'. The usual topics of the funeral sermons over married women (analysed on the basis of other Czech funeral speeches and secondary literature) are entirely absent. For the more, the deceased woman was not buried in the Lažany family tomb in the Premonstratensian basilica of the Assumption in Strahov, but in front of the altar of St. Francis Xavier in the Jesuit church of Salvator Mundi, where her uncle Vojtěch Eusebius of Šternberk was buried (the Šternberks were in close contacts with the Jesuits). Sermons over Maria Maximiliana of Lažany exceed traditional descriptions of relations between man and woman, and her original family. Burial sermons depict both period discourse and social reality of the time, thinking of the then people, cultural patterns of their behaviour and personal preferences.