of sixteenth-century concerns. Here, the Hussites are examined against the context of early fifteenth-century religion and culture and of Prague, the vibrant capital of the Holy Roman Empire, one of the largest cities in Europe and the home to the first university in the empire north of the Alps. This illumines what is truly revolutionary about the movement: in early fifteenth-century Prague, disagreements about religion were shouted in the streets and taught to the laity in the vernacular, giving rise to a whole new kind of public engagement that would persist into the early modern era. The Hussites brought theological learning to the people, not mere catechesis or moral education, and employed a variety of genres, including songs, poems, tractates, letters, manifestos, and sermons. The leaders, many of whom were also university masters, provided the laity with the tools to discuss contentious issues and arrive at their own conclusions, empowering the semi-learned and unlearned to make up their own minds about important theological issues. While there exists a literature on theology as an institutional practice, it is mostly restricted to studies of universities or framed as the province of “subversive” laymen. None of this explains the marketplace of competing religious ideas in the vernacular that emerged in Bohemia a full hundred years before the Reformation. This is also a new way of telling the story of Jan Hus and the Hussite movement, recasting the ways in which Hus’s vernacular works formed a discrete religious faction in what is now the Czech Republic, Germany, and Poland. The vernacular writings of all genres are considered, instead of merely “official,” Latin, erudite reports. What emerges is a rich portrait of a society in transition, a polyphony of voices discussing religion and other influential questions, which made the Latin academic discussions irrelevant, ushering in an era of new and previously unimaginable possibilities for the laity.
Mass Movements Before the Printing Press
The Reformation of the 1520s is generally accounted the first large-scale grassroots campaign rooted in a theological agenda. The traditional narrative holds that the invention of the printing press enabled these reformers, for the first time in history, to shape and channel a mass religious movement.14 However, religious movements employing the vernacular, such as the Lollards in England or the Hussites in Bohemia, had mobilized lay populations long before the invention of the printing press. While there are scholarly questions about the actual extent and influence of the Lollard movement, despite the elaborate attention given it by a generation of scholars, there is no question that the Hussite controversies turned the capital of the empire into the site of religious dissent and unrest, evident by public acts of violence against people and property, the extent of which astonished observers in the empire and beyond.
The Hussite reformers in the early fifteenth century offer an especially striking case of a successful late medieval mass movement driven by a theological agenda. Marked by strong ethnic or even nationalistic overtones, it was precipitated by the Council of Constance’s decision to put Jan Hus to death as a heretic in July 1415. Hus’s former colleagues at the university in Prague continued his work, preaching the message of reform, and, with time, they incited the laity to disobey the ecclesiastical authorities. Within a few years, the movement’s leaders—with the tacit support of the king—won a number of important ritual and administrative victories. For example, the Hussite priests offered the sacrament of the mass in both bread and wine (sub utraque specie), a practice discontinued in the twelfth century and banned as heretical by the Council of Constance in 1415. Hussite leaders also secured a de facto independence from the archbishop in matters of parish appointments and other administrative decisions, making the university in Prague the official head of the Hussite parishes in the realm. Between 1420 and 1432, the Hussite leaders succeeded in fighting off successive armies of crusaders. At the Council of Basel in 1436, the Hussites even gained the grudging approval of a church council to continue their own particular religious practices within Bohemia. The Hussites were the only medieval “heresy” ever to achieve such concessions from a council.
The Hussite success, achieved without the benefits of the printing press, would, however, have been unthinkable without the direct and active support of the laity. Their involvement had been planned for from the start. In order to mobilize the laity for their reform agenda, the Hussite leaders wrote different kinds of vernacular writings that combined catechesis with severe criticism of the church. First, they persuaded the laity that the medieval church was in need of reform. Later they claimed that they, and not the pope, represented the true church.15 Making the laity privy to these intra-ecclesiastical disputes gave rise to what Jürgen Habermas later came to call the public sphere.16 In Bohemia, this sphere grew out of disagreements about how religious, political, and social life ought to be arranged, disagreements that were now openly expressed. It transformed the expectations for how religious or political discourse would be conducted in the future. Obviously this touches upon themes first raised by Habermas17 but argues for notions of “publics” in the plural that were distinctively medieval, diverse, sometimes overlapping, and as yet broadly understudied. In fifteenth-century Bohemia theology became vernacularized in intellectual, literary, and social terms, thus allowing the laity for the first time to organize themselves into discrete religious factions and to participate in the discussion of religious and political issues. It was a brazen move and a virtual revolution with profound consequences in Bohemia and throughout the empire.
The Hussite message gained a large number of followers because it answered a growing desire among the laity for theological education in the vernacular as laymen made conscious commitments to Christian life that transcended indifferent observance.18 In Hussite studies, this kind of popular support is generally presumed to be self-evident. Jan Hus and the Hussites are regarded as national heroes, whom the laity would naturally have supported. In addition, this narrative was first written by theologians who saw the Catholic Church as necessarily headed toward the Reformation. But this is the stuff of hindsight and special agendas, both national and religious. We need rather to appreciate the artfulness and cunning with which the reformers addressed their contemporaries. Many of the pro-Hussite compositions imparted new theological information, quoted scriptural passages, paraphrased church fathers, and explained relevant points of doctrine. This is not to say, of course, that the pro-reform compositions are only educational. Many of them are deeply polemical and argumentative, presenting only those theological arguments that favored their cause. Thus, the genius of the pro-Hussite campaign: they gave the people what they wanted but wrapped their educational message in a coating of antagonism against the established church and its directives.
This demand for religious literature was not limited to Bohemia. Elsewhere in Europe the production of vernacular works increased steadily since the 1380s, especially in German, Dutch, and English. The tradition of vernacular religious texts began as early as the thirteenth century and paralleled university and monastic traditions of learning.19 However, in the late medieval period the kind of writing that would originally have been meant for a monastic audience was now written explicitly for the laity. This included all sorts of catechetical writings, that is, works that introduced the fundamental tenets of the faith and their correct application in every day life, such as explanations of the Paternoster, Ave Maria, the working of the mass, as well as instruction on the sacraments and teaching about virtue and sin. In addition to catechetical works, collections of sermons, as well as contemplative and mystical texts, were also increasingly finding an audience outside of the religious houses.20 Clearly, this growing desire among the laity for theological education was not limited to Bohemia. The demand was also fueled by growing establishments of church and city schools for the children of middle-class parents and a sense of prestige that religious literacy bestowed.
The majority of the authors of these vernacular texts were among learned and high-ranking officials of the church. This is important, because it means that this tradition of writings was never seen as independent from the clerical class, their goals and preferences, as some modern scholars would like. There were exceptions, of course, such as Thomas of Štítný (1333–1401/1409), Czech lay nobleman who wrote catechetical works in the vernacular.21 But for the most part, the vernacular texts were authored by members of the secular and regular clergy, many of whom considered themselves in favor of church reform and who wished to make university erudition useful to those laymen
