immorality in sermons to the laity, he found himself facing charges of heresy almost overnight. The charges were later dropped, but Hus continued to labor under suspicions of scandalous preaching and of inciting the laity against clerics. In his vernacular writings, the message of lay piety was inextricably linked to an exhortation to disobey immoral and corrupt clerics. This is how the Bethlehem Chapel, where Hus delivered most of his sermons, became both a source of vernacular catechesis and complaints against clerical colleagues. Hus was not the only charismatic preacher who criticized his fellow clerics; this practice was endemic to sermons of numerous reformers, such as Johann Geiler, and it may have contributed to the church’s loss of authority in lay circles.34 In Bohemia, Hus’s followers continued this trend and their public complaints against other clerics produced a laity watchful of clerical immorality and escalated into a kind of civil war between clerical factions, which would be repeated with the sixteenth-century Reformation. The Hussite writings for the laity fit well in the burgeoning genre of vernacular theological writings, but by combining catechesis with an invitation to dissent they became dangerous. They also became antithetical to the original goals of vernacular writings, which were to strengthen, and not undermine, the church’s unity.
The ease with which vernacular theological writings were repurposed reflects their popularity. It also underscores how divided the church was, with the main division running not between laity and clergy, as is often maintained, but between different groups of clerics. This process of fracturing extended seemingly in all directions, including, for example, the Franciscans and Franciscan Spirituals. The fact that university masters should become leaders of groups reaching into the laity—a phenomenon that is not at all obvious—is a product of these increasingly irreconcilable divisions among the Latinate class. When they reached a stalemate, masters turned to the laity and joined forces with them in a way that would previously have been unthinkable. Understood in this way, the Hussite movement was an attack of one group of clergy against another.
This is the broad context for this book about theology in the vernacular: increased desire for participation that challenged the exclusivity of clerical learning and monastic devotional practices and that gave rise to diverse groups within the church, competing for influence and authority. Groups like the Devotio Moderna undermined the monastic monopoly on spiritual perfection. It was no accident that both of the fifteenth-century popular heretical movements, the Lollards in England and the Hussites in Bohemia, grew out of university reform programs.35 These programs were nothing new, but the potency of their popular appeal was. The laity wished to participate in semi-academic discourse, clearly evident, for example, in the intense debates over the Eucharist in Bohemia and in England, with a number of vernacular treatises on the topic.36 The lack of consensus among the Lollards or Hussites on a subject as fundamental to Christian life as the Eucharist also suggests that in the absence of a central enforcer, different groups of clerics and laity settled on whichever understanding most appealed to them, giving rise to factionalism.37
A World in Decline?
According to the older standard accounts, this was a world in decline, on the brink of a catastrophe. And by some standards, it was. Academic heresies proliferated into massive popular movements. Anticlericalism was on the rise. All ranks of the society called for church reform. Papal authority had been damaged by decades of schism yet unwilling to do anything that would weaken its control. Other institutions, both religious and secular, hardly fared better. To them, the so-called “long fifteenth century” brought discord, divisions, and disorder.38 But this is a one-sided and distorted picture. Judging by other standards, the fifteenth century was brimming with religious vitality, even if, like all other transformational periods, its narrative history is rather messy around the edges.39 This is certainly true of Bohemia, whose fifteenth-century developments were once—and influentially—described as an aberration in medieval history.40 But the Hussite wars are not an aberration. They mirror spectacularly tensions existing under the surface of the religious status quo. In Bohemia, as in England and elsewhere, many clerics aligned with the laity to bring about changes or reforms that they thought necessary. The alliances took a number of different forms, such as preaching circles, religious fraternities, or communities, but all were primarily fueled by the nascent vernacular textual production. In turn, the texts contributed to the breaking down of the traditional divisions and separations between laity and clergy, reconfiguring them into new kinds of groups and communities. It is no accident that the Council of Constance ruled specifically against such alliances, banning “any alliance made between the laity or between the laity and the clergy to the detriment of the holy council, the apostolic see and the Church in favor of those condemned heretics Jan Hus and Jerome and preachers of that sect … apparent by the letters written to the sacred council.”41
The religious controversies of the fifteenth century brought about changes in the fabric of the church that are not yet well described. In order to illuminate the link between theology in the vernacular and the formation of factions in the church, the terms “heresy” and “heretic” are avoided in the chapters that follow. The Hussites were declared heretics by the church and deemed dangerous enough to merit the interest of five crusading armies. Accepting the label means accepting a one-sided category that defines groups by their opposition to the authority of the church or the pope. Worse, the label imposes a kind of artificial unity, obfuscating the very real differences and disagreements among those declared heretics.42 The term “heresy” evokes a marginalized, sidelined, and isolated group of people, completely obscuring the fact that in Bohemia, religious observances deemed heretical became in some areas mainstream. The label also obliterates variations among heretical groups. These differences often proved so serious as to be insurmountable, in a similar way that the label “orthodoxy” obliterates differences between different orthodox groups, among whom there existed “sets of ideas and modes of worship that enjoyed distinctive and to some extent separate existences, whilst coming under the broader umbrella of ‘orthodoxy.’ ”43 Finally, these labels turn late medieval Europe into a binary landscape and religion into a yes-or-no proposition. The following chapters seek to uncover the textual production that gave rise to different factions and guided their exchanges with others, some deemed heretical. This allows us to see what divided the heretics and what brought them together. It is only when we sidestep the label of heresy that we can finally recover some of the importance of the Hussite movement: a series of debates and discourses about topics at the heart of laity’s religious experience of utmost importance to fifteenth-century Christians.
Another note on nomenclature: there is some (friendly) disagreement among scholars of fifteenth-century Bohemia regarding the precise words to use in describing the reform movement that gains momentum in the early decades of that century, becomes divisive by Jan Hus’s martyr’s death at Constance, and is transformed into a violent struggle, with the reform’s adherents alternating between fighting the pope’s crusaders and fighting each other until the Council of Basel recognized the establishment of a legitimate, national church in Bohemia, called the Utraquist Church after its practice of offering communion to the laity in both kinds in 1436.44 At which point can we talk about Utraquism? Does it obfuscate more than it clarifies when we refer to the reformers as “Hussites,” a name coined by their detractors to associate them with the condemned heretic? It turns out that it depends on who you ask. In the pages that follow, I will use the adjective “Hussite” to refer to the reformers. Although the term started out as an expression of opprobrium, by opponents of Hus and his supporters, it quickly became the “conventional term for the Bohemians in the wider European consciousness.”45 As for distinguishing among the different pro-reform factions, my discussion will move between the commune at Tábor (peopled by the Taborites) and Prague, whose reformers tended to be more theologically moderate and will sometimes be referred to as “the moderates.” However, their churches in which they offered communion under both kinds to the laity since 1414 will be referred to as “Utraquist” although the official recognition (and tolerance) of that fact would not come until 1436 and the Council of Basel.46
This book also contradicts some accepted wisdom about the kinds of changes that were supposedly only results of the sixteenth-century
