Style Sheet

1. Format and layout

Articles should be submitted in Times New Roman, font size 12. Footnote text should be size 10, also Times New Roman.

The text should be left-aligned, not justified. Use 1.5 indents at the beginning of every paragraph. Leave only a single space between a full stop and the beginning of the next sentence.

We encourage sub-headings to help guide the reader navigate, but not too many. Do not use numbers for these, but put them in boldface.

 

2. Common issues of spelling and punctuation

Spelling should follow standard British English usage.

The '-ise' word ending is preferred ('organise' not 'organize').

Capitalise initial letters in titles and office-holders when directly associated with one specific individual, especially when the title is used on its own: E.g. the King regularly corresponded with other European kings.

A title is capitalised when directly preceding a proper name: Archduke Leopold, Countess Nostitz, Baron Ugarte.

Generic institutions, household or government departments or offices, principal and unique rooms in palaces and other important buildings, and so on should always have upper case initial letters: the Privy Council, the Imperial Court Chancellery, the Bohemian Chamber, the Highest Chancellor, the Withdrawing Room (but 'the court' is lower case).

Avoid contractions unless quoting.

Accents and italics should not be used for words fully adopted into English, such as role, regime, elite. (See section 6 for spellings of proper names).

Ellipses (i.e. omitted matter) should be indicated by the square brackets and three dots […] with a space on either side.)

Contracted words and acronyms do not require dots (Mr, St, NATO, ills, eds, vols, fols), though abbreviations do (vol., col., ed., pp.).

An apostrophe and an additional 's' should be used for the possessive form of singular proper names ending in 's' (e.g. Charles's, Francis's). Do not use the apostrophe for plurals: MPs and CDs; 1760s, not 1760's.

Hyphens should be used in compound adjectives and adverbs (e.g. 'sixteenth-century literature', 'slow-sailing vessel', 'well-known books'), but not in structures such as 'the book is well known', 'this was in the sixteenth century'. Hyphens should not be used for compounds with adverbs ending in '-ly' ('beautifully written books').

Always use two hyphens for compound words such as up-to-date. With numbers, they are used in adjectival form, but not otherwise: a twenty-eight-year-old bird with a thirty-two-foot wingspan; but the bird is twenty-eight years old and has a wingspan of thirty-two feet.

 

3. Quotations

Quotations should have single inverted commas (quotation marks). Do not use italics for any quoted text. E. g. He said: 'Do not follow me. It is dangerous.'

If a contributor wishes to quote a passage of text from the source material in a language other than English, they should translate it into English. Original texts can appear in the footnotes. There may be occasions where a contributor wishes to quote a phrase or abridged extract in its original language. In such cases, this should always be followed by an English translation in square brackets or the footnote.

 

4. Foreign languages

Names of towns, cities and countries should be in English where they are commonly used (Prague and Vienna rather than Praha and Wien). Names of institutions such as universities, libraries and museums should use the original language, except where the English equivalent is commonly used.

Names of foreign kings and queens should be given in their English form where one exists (Charles VI, Catherine the Great, Henry IV). Exceptions exist for names usually seen in English in their original, for various reasons, such as Ludwig of Bavaria.

Transliterations into the Roman alphabet (e.g. from Russian, Greek, Chinese, Arabic) should be done in the most common modern English form (e.g. Romanov not Romanoff, Tsar not Czar, Caliph not Khalīfah, Shah not Šāh).

 

5. Numbers

Numbers should be written out up to one hundred and after that as figures (twenty-three, 156).

Numbers of four digits or more should have commas (2,000).

Precise measurements, money and percentages should be in figures.

 

6. Dates

Date ranges should not be shortened to the decade (1675–1696).

Full dates should be in the form: 13 May 1745 (not May 13th, 1745).

Use BC and AD (without dots).

Centuries should be written in full ('in the sixteenth century'), but decades should have the form of the 1750s, the 1890s.

 

7. Capitalisation of initial letters in the titles of books and articles

In English titles, the initial letters of the first word and all important words are capitalised: The Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives and Spain in the Age of Exploration, 1492–1819. In two-part titles, the first word after the colon is also capitalised: Turks: A Journey of a Thousand Years, 600–1600.

In all other European languages except French (see below), but including Latin, the capitalisation rules follow the rules for normal prose, that is, only the first word and proper nouns (in German all nouns) take an initial capital: Los viajes de Rubens a España: oficios diplomáticos de un pintor and De senectute and Briefe: eine erstaunliche Korrespondenz – Cosima Wagner und Ludwig II. von Bayern.

In French titles, all words except proper nouns and the first word of the title have lower-case initial letters: Objets d'art: mélanges en l'honneur de Daniel Alcouffe.

 

8. References

Footnote references should fall, whenever possible, at the end of a sentence, or at least the end of a phrase, and should always be placed after adjacent punctuation marks. All page numbers should be preceded by p. and a space (p. 94). All footnotes should end with a full stop.

In general, we use the same style of references as Český časopis historický.

The title of a book, article or collective volume should appear in italics.

Jaroslav PÁNEK, Poslední Rožmberk. Životní příběh Petra Voka, Praha 1996, p. 56.

Ivan HLAVÁČEK – Jaroslav KAŠPAR – Rostislav NOVÝ, Vademecum pomocných věd historických, Praha 31997, pp. 250-254.

David CRANZ, Historie der böhmischen Emigration. Eine historisch-kritische Edition, ed. by Matthias NOLLER, Wiesbaden 2013.

Josef ŽEMLIČKA, Kníže a král v souřadnicích přemyslovského věku, Český časopis historický 114, 2016, pp. 7-31.

Petr VOREL, Die Fiskal- und Währungsstrategie der böhmischen Stände in den Jahren 1609–1618, in: Jaroslava Hausenblasová – Jiří Mikulec – Martina Thomsen (eds), Religion und Politik im frühneuzeitlichen Böhmen: der Majestätsbrief Kaiser Rudolfs II. von 1609, Stuttgart 2014, pp. 133-140.

Second and subsequent references should be in the short title format:

(first reference) Josef PEKAŘ, Bílá hora. Její příčiny a následky, Praha 1921, p. 19.

(immediate reference in the next footnote) Ibidem, pp. 23-25.

(subsequent references) J. PEKAŘ, Bílá hora, p. 9.

For references to archival material: Include the name of the archive, name of the particular collection and unit, divided by commas.

Národní archiv Praha (hereafter NA Praha), Stará manipulace, sign. H 12/33, cart. 86, fols 56-64.

 

9. Illustrations and maps

Although there is no need for articles to include illustrations, these are welcome provided that they are of good quality and historical merit. Two or three images in any given article would be a typical quantity. If a contributor wishes to include illustrations, this should be discussed with the editor in good time. 

In all cases, it is the responsibility of the article's author to have obtained permission for the use of any images. Responsibility for any copyright abuse lies with the author who provided the image, not with the journal or its editors.

Illustrations (generally integrated into the text rather than a separate section) will only be considered if they are high resolution and presented in an acceptable format: JPEG or TIFF files.

Many of the images found on the internet are too low resolution (too few dots per inch) for publication. A resolution of at least 300 dpi is required. In addition, the fact that an image is available on the internet does not mean that it can be used without permission. Authors should therefore ensure they have contacted the copyright holder and obtained a high-quality digital copy, together with permission to use it. 

Unfortunately, the journal's budget does not allow for payment for images. Therefore, if a contributor wishes to use an image that requires payment (for photography or digitisation or permission or both), they must pay the institution in question.

The author should provide complete information for each image and present it in the form in which the caption will appear, as in the following example:

Figure 1: Johann Baptist Homann (1664–1725), a German geographer and cartographer, engraving of Johann Wilhelm Windter (1696–1765) after the painting of Johannes Kenckel (1688–1722), between 1728 and 1750.

The required placement of these images should be clearly stated in the text.