Středověké a raně novověké ikonografické doklady jako pramen k poznání agrární kultury

Iconographic documentation forms an integral part of the source basis of a number of social science disciplines, including ethnology. From the compiled overview, which by no means aspires to being exhaustive, we can get an idea about the meaning of pictorial material for the research of agrarian culture, mainly of its development stages in the period of early and high Middle Ages. We can find a representative selection of Czech iconographic material from the period of high Middle Ages and early modern times in the classic pictorial work Homo faber (1967) and in several magazine studies, the authors of which are D. Stránská, V. Trkovská, J. Kramařík, Z. Smetánka, V. Šmelhaus etc. Comparative material can be found in foreign literature (S. Kovačevičová, M. Kučera, V. H. Pötler, E. Castelnuovo, L. Belcredi). Even though working with depictions of various kinds is difficult and full of problems, it forms an indispensable part of the source basis for the individual industries of agrarian production in addition to the findings of medieval archaeology, and written sources – unfortunately scarce.