Catholic publicist and Habsburg agent Kaspar Schoppe (1576–1649) was probably the most prolific author of political pamphlets in the early years of the Thirty Years' War. Born into a Lutheran family and converted to Catholicism in Prague in 1597, this highly talented philologist has been remembered mostly as "one of the attack dogs of Catholic erudition" or as a ruthless supporter of the Counter Reformation. This lecture presents Schoppe's political thought and propaganda activity as reflected in his anonymous pamphlets written against the King of Bohemia, Frederick I, and a manuscript letter, in which he advised Emperor Ferdinand II on how to use the victory over the Bohemians after the Battle of White Mountain. While Schoppe's activity as an agent and councillor was informed by Machiavellian political thinking, he also started consciously fighting for Machiavelli's rehabilitation, which became one of his life projects. The goal of the lecture is not only to highlight the authorship of important pamphlets and give a coherent interpretation of Schoppe's Machiavellism, but also to call attention to Machiavelli's influence in treating the Bohemian crisis.

Gábor Almási: 1996 MA in history at Eötvös Loránd University; 1997 MA in history and anthropology at University College London; 2005 PhD in history at Central European University. Since 2014 he is senior researcher of the project "Humanism in East Central Europe" financed by the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and affiliated to Eötvös Loránd University. Contemporaneously, since 2011 he is external researcher of the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Neo-Latin Studies in Innsbruck.

Interests:  Renaissance humanism, history of science, history of religions, Republic of Letters, history of the court, political propaganda, Machiavelli's reception, patriotism and nationalism.

Books: The Uses of Humanism. Johannes Sambucus (1531–1584), Andreas Dudith (1533–1589), and the East Central European Republic of Letters (Leiden: Brill, 2009); A Secretissima instructio (1620). A kora újkori politikai paradigmaváltás egy Bethlen-kori röpirat tükrében [The Secretissima instructio (1620). The paradigm shift in early modern politics as reflected in a pamphlet of the Bethlen era] (Budapest: ELTE BTK, 2014); Humanistes du bassin des Carpates II. Johannes Sambucus, ed. by G. Almási and G. Farkas Kiss (Turnhout: Brepols, 2014); A Divided Hungary in Europe: Exchanges, Networks, and Representations, 1541−1699, 3 vols., ed. by G. Almási et al. (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2014); Latin at the Crossroads of Identity. The Evolution of Linguistic Nationalism in the Kingdom of Hungary, ed. by G. Almási and L. Šubarić (Leiden: Brill, 2015).

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