Introduction

      Describing the situation in Prague in 1421, Lawrence of Březová, the chief chronicler of the Hussite movement in Bohemia, records a surprising incident. He tells of a group of women in the New Town district of Prague, who were so dissatisfied with the way in which the councilmen managed the religious affairs in their district that they wrote what we might call an open letter to them. In the letter, recorded in the vernacular in an otherwise Latin chronicle, the women complain that numerous priests in Prague do not believe that the Eucharist really is God’s body and blood and that this heresy is taught to the laity. The women write: “We are afraid that many of the new priests, who hold heretical beliefs, continue to be appointed to parishes where they blaspheme against God and doctrine and against the rituals of the church. Meanwhile, you, councilmen, watch it happen and do nothing to stop it… . Therefore, we beg you to take action, for example, you could tell the priest in Poříčí that you will no longer tolerate the violence that he inflicts on the holy sacrament. If you do not wish to do this, if you continue to ignore the true faith, we will be forced to turn against you and so help us God.”¹

      This petition captured the squabbles between two major pro-reform factions (Prague and Tábor), characteristic of the period between 1419 and 1436, which was generally seen as the main phase of the Hussite revolution and is the central focus of this book. For most of the period, the two main reform factions struggled against each other for adherents and for control over parishes in Prague and across Bohemia, with the Eucharist looming as the most divisive subject, as some were swayed by Wycliffite and other reform ideas and others rejected them.² The standard narrative of the Hussite reform assumes that the only notable theological discussions were held among the educated clerics. Scholars have dismissed exchanges such as this one as mere complaints by the laity who were, it is implied, naturally garrulous and had little to contribute to the theological reflections at the university. This latter assumption is partly true. The laity had little to add to the theological deliberations among the reform’s leaders, but the example shows that they knew enough about them to debate with each other and to form their own opinions. The narrative needs to be refocused to take into account the real importance of the women’s official complaint: it shows that theological debates were not confined to the clerical caste, nor were they confined to Latin. The women clearly understood the basic ramifications of the debate and officially—and in their vernacular—protested against the priests’ Wycliffite understanding of the mass, even threatening disobedience if their request, which was theological in nature, went unheeded. Moreover, the women were convinced that they—and, this is important, not their priest—held the “true faith” and swore to commit acts of civil unrest, such as turning against their councilmen, in order to promote what they understood this to be. This shows that disagreements about what constituted “true faith” divided also the laity, who held their own conclusions with impressive confidence, even in the face of powerful city magistrates.

      Such was the nature of religious disagreements in fifteenth-century