show that, in Bohemia, learned culture began to impact popular culture long before the sixteenth-century reformers responded to the laity’s desire for theological information.47 But other groups and initiatives suggest that even in other areas, the laity tried to increase their participation in Christian practices and to understand it in a way that suited them best, well before Martin Luther appeared on the scene.48 When he did appear, Luther’s nascent movement could rely on a “rather well-read and critical urban readership among the urban elites … that had educated itself largely through its independent study of religious literature in the vernacular.”49
The rejection of Latin and of the scholastic modes of settling theological disputes brought about a number of unintended consequences. Among them was a deep crisis of authority that deepened during the sixteenth-century Reformation and was never again universally resolved. In Bohemia, Scripture and God’s law were thought to provide authority, but the daily squabbles revealed only too well the limitations of texts as decisive arbiters of anything.50 It was clear that human readers were needed to interpret them, but without a single and agreed-upon arbiter of doctrine, the veracity of theological arguments directly related to their persuasiveness. What the lay followers came to accept became, in effect, the truth. One only needs a passing acquaintance with recent political campaigns in the United States in order to understand the disastrousness of this approach. Accordingly, in fifteenth-century Bohemia, writers looked for ways to be persuasive in the vernacular in order to endow their words with authority. But because laymen and laywomen were asked to accept arguments on grounds other than intrinsic theological merit, which they were not able to evaluate, writers resorted to a number of misleading strategies, such as reading biblical texts out of context or interpreting certain passages literally where previously allegorical readings had been preferred. Authors resorted to Bible-tweaking, accusations, and invective, or sought alternative markers of authority such as morality or martyr status of leaders.51 As a result of bringing theological debates into the vernacular, discourse became more deeply polarized and discussions became increasingly polemical, with diminishing chances of arriving at an agreement.
In seven chapters, ordered chronologically, this book analyzes the role of vernacular writings in the formation of different religious factions, focusing on the shift to theology in the vernacular and the repercussions of that shift for Bohemia in the first third of the fifteenth century, between 1412 and 1436.
The book covers the beginning phase of the so-called Hussite revolution, between 1412, when Jan Hus first radicalized his followers, and 1436, the agreement between reform leaders and the Council of Basel permitting the Hussite ritual practice to continue. This was a time when the reform movement’s leaders most needed to garner the laity’s support and employed the vernacular for that purpose. Vernacular production was at its most frequent and most creative, translating and simplifying basic theological arguments (about the Bible, about the church’s ritual practice, about authority in the church) and presenting them to the people in a variety of formats. However, this level of access came at a price. While the process of translation and simplification made basic theological arguments intelligible to the laity, the education contained therein had an ulterior motive: not only to educate but to persuade. This is why theological arguments were often augmented by appeals to emotion and fearmongering, deemed persuasive in a way that to a layperson mere theology could not be. And there was an additional cost of theology in the vernacular: Divorced from the traditions and conventions of the university milieu, there was no agreed-upon arbiter of disputes, and the Bible, which many touted as the New Law, proved simply too malleable in the hands of competing interpreters. Due to these hidden costs of theology in the vernacular, vernacular learning actually deepened the ideological divisions that had engulfed Bohemia rather than assuaging them.
The following chapters illustrate that the vernacular discourse, even if it revolved around the same topic, was different from the Latin debates. Theological arguments were simplified and often sacrificed in favor of more intelligible arguments from the Bible or appeals to emotion. These strategies did speak to the laity and persuaded them to side with the reformers, as the nationwide resistance to five different crusading attempts makes clear, but they made agreement about theological issues impossible. The theologically moderate Prague party prevailed only after its followers chose to destroy their former reform brethren in the battle of Lipany in 1434, having joined forces with the Catholics. The scholarship presents this victory in the positive light, as necessary to secure peace and the backing of Rome for reform in Bohemia. But this book complicates this optimism by suggesting that vernacularization of theology increased—rather than decreased—religious factionalism and radicalism, minimizing the chances of an agreement among the leaders.
The first chapter discusses the public activities of Jan Hus up until his excommunication and exile in 1412. It offers a reinterpretation of Hus’s role as a preacher, arguing that although Hus encouraged interior conversion like many other pro-reform preachers, his vernacular preaching proved contentious when he used his pulpit at the Bethlehem Chapel (set up for preaching in the Czech language) to air complaints about the clergy in Prague and to encourage the laity to judge the moral standing of clerics, even to withhold tithes from priests they deemed undeserving.
The second chapter analyzes events subsequent to Jan Hus’s excommunication in 1412. With nothing to lose, Hus’s interactions with the laity became increasingly deliberate, and he used a number of public media, such as wall inscriptions, treatises, open letters, and proclamations, all in order to persuade the laity that although he had lost his legal case against the curia, the moral victory was his and that he, rather than corrupt officials, held authority in the church. In so doing, he deliberately created a religious faction of followers that would continue to push for reform in the church even after his death.
Chapter 3 takes up the short vernacular compositions in verse and song that proliferated in Prague after Hus’s death. Written by leaders of pro- (and anti-) reform factions, these street ditties were meant to persuade the laity to support (or reject) the political agenda of Hus’s successors. This effectively widened the subject areas that the laity were invited to take sides on and prepared the ground for much longer compositions on a variety of theological and political subjects that began circulating by the early 1420s, analyzed in later chapters.
Chapter 4 analyzes the textual production of the radical commune at Tábor or what was left of it after extensive purges in the wake of Tábor’s defeat in the 1430s. The few extant poems that were composed for Tábor’s adherents display a high level of biblicism; they are steeped in the Bible, often quoting it at length. But Tábor’s biblicism is problematic: it is selective and radicalizing.
Chapter 5 focuses on longer compositions written against Tábor. Combined, these compositions show that questions of correct exegesis and rightful authority, among others, were being debated among the laity in different reform and anti-reform factions. Such tractates democratized access to theological learning. But this level of access came at a price: Theological education came to serve political and ideological agendas, and each side translated and disseminated only those arguments that helped them. The goal was to persuade, which meant that being coherent or well informed mattered less than being persuasive. This, in turn, deepened rather than resolved the disagreements between Prague and Tábor to the point that moderate reformers resorted to military intervention against their radical brethren, defeating and marginalizing the commune in the battle of Lipany in 1434.
The sixth chapter focuses on the mass, which traditional accounts held to be at the center of the Hussite dispute. Sidestepping the issue of the lay chalice, the usual focus of scholarly narratives, I argue that in the course of the 1420s Wyclif’s critique of the doctrine of transubstantiation gave rise to a host of vernacular treatises on the nature of the sacrament in Bohemia. This group of treatises, previously unexamined, offers abundant evidence of lay doubt about transubstantiation and debates that aimed to offer alternative
