With the fall of socialism in Europe, the former East bloc nations are experiencing a rebirth of nationalism as they make the difficult transition to a market-based economy and rediscover their roots. The dissolution of Czechoslovakia, in particular, points to the power of ethnic identity and ancestral loyalties over political abstractions.

Using an impressive array of contemporary published and documentary sources, and integrating a large body of secondary material in several languages, Hugh Agnew develops the argument that Czechoslovakia's celebrated national revival of the mid-nineteenth century has its intellectual origins in the Enlightenment.

He describes how intellectuals in eighteenth-century Bohemia and Moravia - the "patriotic intelligentsia" - used their discovery of the pre-seventeenth-century history and literature to revive the antiquated Czech vernacular and to cultivate a popular ethnic consciousness. An outpouring of newspapers periodicals, didactic and entertaining literature, poetry, and drama in Czech attested to the rise in national consciousness during this early period. Equally significant were intellectual contacts with the wider Slavic world whereby these pioneers sought to redefine their ethnic and cultural heritage.

Agnew deftly negotiates a longstanding controversy in Czech historiography over the relative power of the Catholic and Hussite (and Protestant) influences in defining the nation's character and future development - a debate that is itself part of the national mythology.

Origins of the Czech National Renascence will contribute to a renewed interpretation of a crucial period in Czech history, as the historical profession undergoes a massive reorientation in Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Marxist interpreters of the nation's past have been purged, other historians have spent their best years in disgrace, and newer practitioners are only now entering the field.

They will profit from Agnew's extensive research in English, German, Czech, and other languages and his study's valuable bibliographical references.