Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion joins the increasingly substantial body of scholarship on the Hussite movement that has appeared in English in recent decades with a presentation of the vibrant public engagement with theological controversies in the vernacular in late medieval Bohemia. Marcela Perett outlines efforts by predominantly Latin-educated clerics to deploy the Czech vernacular among the laity, thereby enlisting them in their reformist (and at times anti-reformist) efforts during the tense decades of the Bohemian Reformation. Through tracts, songs, satires, sermons, wall paintings, and placards, polemicists and preachers like Jan Hus involved eager lay audiences in complex and often dangerous public controversies, though the nuances of hitherto scholastic debates were often lost in the mix. Still, as Perett shows, the success or failure of a given position or sect could hinge on its proponents’ ability to deploy relevant genres in the vernacular effectively. She wisely avoids the tendency of much recent scholarship to idealize the increasing use of the vernacular in theological contexts. Much good did come of this activity, but with it came dangerous populist manipulation by clerics who appealed to audiences that were unequipped to evaluate complex theological arguments on their own merits. This opened the gates to intense political and social pressure in the resolution of theological, ecclesiological, or liturgical disputes.
Chapter 1 introduces Jan Hus's early public engagement before his exile in 1412. Hus's vernacular preaching at Prague's Bethlehem Chapel encouraged lay audiences to weigh the moral status of their clerics and act upon their assessments by taking practical steps, like withholding tithes or abandoning their parishes. The tolerance that Hus enjoyed from Bohemian churchmen when he aired his reformist teachings in closed, Latinate circles wore thin when he exposed them to more popular audiences. Perett gives the impression that Hus's reformist preaching was in part self-serving, pitting his own authority against that of the church in a deliberate effort at faction formation.
The second chapter elaborates the argument that Hus set out to create a reformist faction. After his exile, and with his hopes for reconciliation with church authorities largely dashed, Hus “went public” (52) with his grievances and deployed a range of media in the vernacular to cultivate the sense of his moral (if not legal) victory over corrupt officials and to educate his lay followers through his vernacular letters and treatises. Convinced of his authority, these followers could then persist in his cause after his death. Perett contends that the polemics about matters of religion by which Hus groomed his lay audience gave rise to a kind of “public sphere” (78) in which debates would continue to unfold after Hus's execution at Constance in 1415.
The next three, closely connected, chapters shift to the flurry of texts that were produced primarily in Prague and at the radical reformist community at Tábor in the wake of Hus's death. Chapter 3 attends to the verses and songs that circulated in remarkable numbers in Prague after 1415 and that took stances both for and against the Hussite reformist program. These opened up a wider range of political and theological subject matter for engagement by popular audiences and in an expanding variety of genres. The handful of surviving poems produced at Tábor (the subject of chapter 4), for example, display a sophisticated biblicism that is channeled selectively to advance a radical agenda. Longer texts were written against Tábor, as discussed in chapter 5. These provide evidence of intense lay interest in questions of exegetical method and the basis of authority on earth. Perett contends that the “democratized access” (18) to theological considerations that these tracts afforded had the effect of deepening divisions rather than reconciling them and that this situation contributed to Prague's eventual military intervention in Tábor at the battle of Lipany in 1434.
Chapter 6 then turns to a set of vernacular treatises on the Mass that took inspiration from John Wyclif's attacks on the doctrine of transubstantiation. Attention to controversy over the sacrament of the altar in Bohemia usually centers on frequent communion and the administration of the lay chalice, whereas these tracts examine the nature of the Eucharist itself. As Perett argues, these texts show that the laity was capable of producing a range of responses to complex theological questions.
The seventh chapter addresses two important chronicles that were written about the Hussite reform: the Historia Hussitica (1420s) by Lawrence of Březová, a Hussite sympathizer; and the Historia Bohemica (1458) by Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, the future Pope Pius II. Though both chronicles were written in Latin, Perett shows that they represent responses to the earlier lay theological disputes in the vernacular, even to the point of employing similar means of persuasion.
Perett presents an important synthesis that explains the position of what she terms “theology in the vernacular” during the Hussite reform. A few points of criticism might be offered in the interest of balance. Some of the claims to being first on the scene could be tempered; for example, the surprising statement that the “entire discourse in the vernacular” with which this study concerns itself “has been ignored and its importance downplayed” (19). This does not seem to me to describe the state of the field in recent Czech-language scholarship, even if there is always room for more attention and new perspectives. Some chapters (e.g., chapter 6) skew toward description, whereas more close analysis of the relevant texts would be an asset, and it might be helpful to provide readers more regularly with passages translated from the original texts or details that they can then use to judge the merits of the argument for themselves (this is less of an issue in chapters 3–5). In other words, some stretches of the argument can rely too much on the force of assertion, not demonstration. Regardless, this study will be a very welcome contribution to scholars of religious controversy in Bohemia and of popular religious movements elsewhere in late medieval Europe.
