Welcome to the website of the Department for Comenius Studies and Intellectual History of the Early Modern Period (OKID for short), currently the only department in the Czech Republic that focuses on publishing and researching the works of Jan Amos Comenius in the broad context of the intellectual history of the early modern period.

The main task of the department is to study the life and work of Jan Amos Komenský and the broader context of the intellectual history of the Czech lands and Central Europe in the early modern period. At present, OKID is the only department in the Czech Republic that is systematically devoted to the work of Comenius, both in the field of editing and interpretation. In recent years, OKID has also emerged as an important centre for the study of humanism in the Czech lands. Within the Institute, its activities are mainly related to research projects devoted to the history of Czech thought. The main emphasis is on the preparation of the critical edition of The Works of Jan Amos Comenius - J. A. Comenii Opera omnia. According to this task, which has a history of more than fifty years, a versatile team of workers has been assembled, consisting of classical philologists, Bohemians, historians and philosophers, capable of mapping the entire breadth of Comenius' work, written mainly in two languages: Latin and Czech. An important part of the work is also the preparation of the Comenius series of editions and translations, which includes mainly Czech translations of Comenius' works, and the publication of the Acta Comeniana, an international journal of Comenius and the intellectual history of the early modern period. At the same time, the department's staff also researches other topics related to the intellectual history of the early modern period, such as scholarly correspondence networks, the transfer of Melanchthonian natural philosophy, humanism in the Czech lands, encyclopaedic projects in Central Europe, early modern historiography in relation to empirical epistemology, transcultural transfers in early modern culture, metaphors of knowledge, early modern drama and Greek poetry in the Czech lands, etc. An integral part of the research interest of the department is the history of Comenius studies, i.e. the field devoted to the history of Comenius studies and their important representatives. For more information see the scientific focus of the team.