has argued that the document served the purpose of announcing Hus’s rejection of ecclesiastical authorities in favor of secular courts, a revolutionary act in itself. More recently, Thomas Fudge has tempered this view by suggesting that Hus’s act “makes sense and is not an act of radicalism or revolutionary intent” but rather an expression of Hus’s commitment to imitate Christ whereas Pavel Soukup has drawn attention to the public aspect of the act.106 All three have their basis. Although God was ostensibly the intended recipient of the appeal, Hus clearly planned to be overheard by a human audience—there is no other reason why he would have devoted so much space to explanations of the curia’s legal proceedings. Hus wished everyone else to know how he had been mistreated, by whom, and why and planned to use any resulting sympathies toward assembling his own opposition party.
The document addresses the lords of the realm directly, in the same order that their names would appear on official documents and charters, which infused the document with a semblance of legitimacy.107 Hus must have hoped that the lords would be sympathetic to his plea and able to offer an alternative jurisdiction, in the High Court. A precedent did exist. In the previous year, the king appointed a high-ranking committee to study and resolve a standing conflict between the archbishop and Hus regarding the ban on preaching.108 And it seems that a royally sponsored resolution was within Hus’s reach again. Within two months, on January 3, 1413, the king ordered the clergy to meet “in order that the pestiferous dissension among the clergy of our realm … be removed and completely extirpated.”109 It appears that the king promised to support Hus over the pope if the preacher stopped his incendiary preaching. This, however, was not the kind of resolution that Hus had in mind, and the meeting eventually came to nothing.
Hus’s identification with Christ and the self-portrayal as the innocent victim in his “Appeal to Christ” endowed him with an aura of moral authority, which he continued to exploit in order to make a compelling case in his favor.
Conclusion
Jan Hus, Bethlehem’s most famous preacher, went from the archbishop’s golden boy to a persona non grata within only a few years. His downfall illustrates the concerns of ecclesiastical authorities as well as their desperate efforts to remain in control over what was preached in Bohemia’s capital. While they welcomed his reforming efforts within the close circle of the clerics, they were suspicious of his taking the same message to the laity. This is understandable. In Hus’s hands, the message of reform gained a distinctly subversive tint when—instead of catechesis—Hus began teaching the laity about the limitations of clerical authority and telling them to leave their parish if it happened to be led by an immoral or corrupt priest. In this view, lay reform consisted of passing a judgment about their clergy and deciding to act on that judgment by disobeying them and even leaving their assigned parish church. This was in keeping with Hus’s Wycliffite ecclesiology. If the communitas praedestinatorum is distinct from the visible church, then it makes sense to take precautions to ensure that one is not ensnared by clerics who are not, in fact, part of God’s church.
However, the archbishop thought differently and accused Hus of inciting the common people to sedition and rebellion against the pope, and the curia launched legal proceedings against him in an effort to ban him from Bethlehem Chapel. In the fall of 1412, the archbishop would succeed and Hus would be exiled from Prague.
Hus’s repeated run-ins with the archbishop and later with the curia show the profound unease of the authorities with Hus’s ability to reach thousands and with his potential to rouse the masses against the authorities. Hus did not back off, however, and by early 1412 he used the pulpit in Bethlehem to point out what he regarded as his opponents’ erroneous ways, their disrespect for the gospel, for God, and for the salvation of the faithful. As the complaints against him grew, Hus’s interactions with the laity became increasingly deliberate. From his pulpit at Bethlehem, Hus communicated to the laity that although he may have fought a losing battle with the curia, the moral victory was his and that he, rather than corrupt officials, held authority in the church. In voicing his disagreements publicly, he began cultivating a faction of supporters, who relied on him, and not on the clerical establishment, to supply the correct understanding of God’s law and of salvation. The following chapter will turn to Hus’s increasingly radicalized activities after his exile from the capital in the fall of 1412, analyzing his strategies for faction formation and exploring their implications for Hus’s career and Bohemia’s religious landscape.
Chapter 2
Creating a Faction
Jan Hus and the Importance of Moral Victory
The exile from Prague, following his “Appeal to Christ” discussed in the previous chapter, hit Hus very hard. But instead of accepting the injustice and backing down, he hit back with the only weapon available to him, his words. In the weeks and months following his departure from Prague, Hus campaigned on his own behalf through letters, sermons, and treatises, all in the vernacular, in an effort to persuade the laity that he was in the right and the curia in the wrong. To the extent that late medieval media allowed him, he “went public” with his disagreement, a decision that had lasting consequences.
In the last three years of his life, Jan Hus used vernacular communications deliberately in order to present himself as an innocent victim of injustice and to create a faction of followers and sympathizers. To that end, he used his letters and his vernacular treatises, each with a different message and emphasis. The letters depict Hus’s quarrel with the curia as a cosmic battle between good and the Antichrist, with Hus in the guise of an Old Testament prophet, another apostle, or saint. The vernacular treatises, On Simony, the three Expositions (of the Faith, of the Ten Commandments, and of the Lord’s Prayer), and Hus’s vernacular Postil belabor these points, adding a devastating criticism of contemporary clergy as well as spiritual advice. They show that Hus’s experience at the hands of the curia also influenced his view of the spiritual life, how it could best be lived, and what was at stake. These writings reveal a pastorally minded Hus, a preacher striving to point his followers to the beauties of the interior life of the faith and a university master eager to educate the faithful in the Scriptures. But they also show a bitter critic of clerical shortcomings and of the clerical culture in general, a disappointed man whose spiritual advice demanded rejection of contemporary religious customs, discord, and partisanship.
Hus’s quest to clear his tarnished reputation before the laity brought the latent divisions and disagreements out into the open and into the vernacular, creating a faction of supporters. Hus’s vernacular communications became an instrument of a “newly defined mode of political communication, in which, besides the economic and political elites, the social strata which had had no say in power decisions thus far—burghers, artisans, women, and the municipal poor—also played their part.”1 This effort to captivate a larger audience was born of an immediate need; because he could not win the legal case brought against him by the curia, Hus retold the events in such a way that allowed him to claim moral victory. These interactions between Hus as the leader of the reformist party and the aristocratic and urban society “gave momentum to the formation of the late medieval public sphere in Bohemia.”2 They were key to the creation of the public sphere in Bohemia and proved an important prerequisite for the success of the Hussite revolt. But how did Hus’s communications bring about “this creation of the new public”? In what way did the vernacular become “an instrument of a newly defined mode of political communication”?3 Hus did so by bringing the disputed questions out among the laity, effectively creating a kind of public forum, in which everyone, lay and cleric alike, was asked to have an opinion and to take a stand. In the last three years of his life, Hus deliberately polarized and offended; his was not pious catechesis but a manifesto of cosmic battle in which everyone was called on to participate. The so-called public sphere grew out of disagreements about fundamental
