93 Music in the Mirror of Religion: On the Discourse of Liturgical Music in the 17 th Century (from Scherer and Beyerlinck to Hoffman and Beckovský) VLADIMÍR MAŇAS Brno This paper examines the representation of music (esp. church music), its origin and use during the early modern period in the Czech lands within two main literary testimonies. Both focus on the role of music in religion – as one can see, this has to do not only with ritual and liturgical music, but as well with music or song as a device to lift the soul up to God. As this paper focuses more on musical culture or the role of music in religion than on music theory, sources in the vernacular, more precisely for the Czech-speaking population, were primarily analysed. 1 In the search for literary testimonies of musical life, serious limits have to be taken into account. Unlike in German speaking lands, where even the prose fiction from the period 1660–1710 permits us to explore the status of a musician (as Stephen Rose recently did) 2 , there is no domestic production of that kind from the Czech lands. For the German-speaking inhabitants of the Czech lands, the situation is similar to the one with the hymnals of the 17th and 18th centuries, because these people often used col- lections printed in German lands. Literature published in Czech was mostly restricted to religious genres such as hymnals, sermons and postillas, and prayer books. 3 Accord- ing to the present state of knowledge, there were almost no novels published and thus it becomes necessary to thoroughly explore the aforementioned religious genres. An important, although mainly compilative work explaining the origin, mean- ing and purpose of ceremonies within the Roman Catholic church, entitled Zrcadlo 1 Various literary testimonies in Latin texts of the 17th century within Czech lands including foremostly works by Balbín and Bolelucký are summarised in MAŇAS, Vladimír: Vulgus Bohemorum Musicae adic- tissimum. Music in the Recatholisation Strategies of the Czech Jesuits in the 17th Century, in Aurora Musas nutrit. Die Jesuiten und die Kultur Mitteleuropas im 16.–18. Jahrhundert. Ed. Ladislav Kačic. Bratislava: Slavistický ústav Jána Stanislava SAV - Teologická fakulta Trnavskej univerzity, 2008, pp. 209-215. 2 ROSE, Stephen: The Musician in Literature in the Age of Bach. Cambridge and New York, Oxford University Press 2011. 3 Detailed survey of various czech texts from the 17th and 18th centuries, which mention music, brings VLKOVÁ, Markéta: Hudba a náboženství v české literární produkci 17. a 18. století. Master thesis, Institute of Musicology, Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno 2014.