Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion. Marcela K. Perett
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man’s heresy, but accusations to that effect did little to weaken the determination of those who held it. The above example illuminates the specifically late medieval context of this disagreement. It involved proliferation of a semi-learned doctrine (based in an academic program) among a highly motivated laity, by clerics, often university educated and in possession of a good living, but who nevertheless distanced themselves from the “institutional” clerics, harshly criticizing the established church and its servants.3 In the case of Bohemia, clerics disagreed about the nature and extent of church reform, and since agreement proved elusive, they turned to the laity for support. To reach their audiences, these clerics, many of whom were university masters, wrote a new kind of vernacular text, trying to persuade the laity to side with them against other clerics.4 The opening example shows that they were successful. One of the (perhaps unintended) consequences of such writings was the emergence of an opinionated, and deeply divided, lay population. Indeed, as the examples in this book suggest, in the 1420s and 1430s, Bohemia was full of laypeople brimming with opinions, willing to debate theology on the slightest provocation. Much like the Roman province of Cappadocia in the fourth century, where—as reported by Gregory of Nyssa—one asked for bread and received an opinion about the nature of Christ’s hypostatic union, Bohemia’s laity was abuzz with debates that resisted any clear-cut resolution.5 The laity was drawn into debates about the mass (the central sacrament of the church and exclusive preserve of priests), about rightful authority in the church, about salvation more broadly, even taking a stance against the city authorities.6 Open debates among people and clergy about central teachings and claims of the church did not first begin in what is called the Protestant Reformation. We see it full-blown in Prague, the late medieval imperial capital, one of the most important cities in the European world at that time, a full century earlier.
Vernacular Writings: Indispensable Yet Often Ignored
Given how much attention the reform leaders in Bohemia paid to their lay followers, it is striking how little those who study these leaders have. Most of the scholarly work on the Hussites has revolved around the careers of the movement’s movers and shakers, their treatises, their ideas and the origins of those ideas, their political and diplomatic negotiations. The two most extensive and influential works on the Hussite movement, Howard Kaminsky’s comprehensive History of the Hussite Revolution and František Šmahel’s Die hussitische Revolution, both focus on the Latin texts that gave shape to the movement. Kaminsky is primarily interested in the intellectual history of the Hussite revolution and deals with the writings and cogitations of the revolution’s erudite leaders, whereas Šmahel offers a social portrait of the movement in order to round out his discussion. And although both of these influential scholars take into consideration the popular element, their analyses deal mainly with Latin treatises and compositions, perpetuating the tacit assumption that the really interesting and important conversation was the one conducted in Latin. Only more recently have scholars turned their attention to the Hussite movement’s vast vernacular output in an attempt to understand the importance it held for the reform leaders themselves, who poured tremendous energy into it throughout the entire period.
In the course of the Hussite reform, the emphasis on vernacular communication was so great that the inherited literary genres were themselves completely transformed. Literary genres that had previously enjoyed high popularity among the laity were no longer perpetuated and practically disappeared.7 In this shift, genres that were previously popular, such as romances and chivalric poetry, were replaced with compositions intended to communicate a political or religious message, such as sermons, tractates, spiritual songs, manifestos, and various other dialogues and monologues, as well as chronicles and annals.8 These were disparate kinds of writings, but they shared an important feature: the educated clerics composed and disseminated them because they were ideologically useful.9 These vernacular writings parallel the enormous expansion of religious literature in German and Dutch and, to some degree, English in this era, but their intense factionalism sets them apart from the vast amount of catechetical and devotional writings circulated elsewhere. In Bohemia, these vernacular works set out the fundamental issues, both theological and ecclesiastical, at stake in the reform, taught the laity about proper scriptural exegesis, and lambasted their opponents. Here catechesis was not politically neutral but served to demarcate the doctrinal lines of the different factions. The interest in literature of entertainment returned after 1436, when the Council of Basel endorsed toleration of Utraquism and sealed a kind of status quo among the religious factions, with such works once again being copied and disseminated. But the kind of literature that was written during the heyday of the Hussite reform, between 1419 and 1436, continued to be written for other occasions of ideological conflict, in which the laity’s consent became important, for example in later debates within the Hussite leadership about the future direction of reform.10 In the span of a mere generation a lasting change was wrought in how theological arguments were conducted, how they were decided, and who participated.
The dominant school of thought that dates back to the 1960s interprets this disappearance of genres as a sign that literature had ceased to be the domain of clerics and nobility and instead came to be “owned” by the laity. This view is attributed to a Marxist reading of the Hussite movement, which projected it as the first serious attempt to overthrow the feudal system, for which the church was only a stand-in.11 The same scholars talked about a shift toward “popularization” of literature, in which the laity began to penetrate the sphere that was previously dedicated to the clergy. However, they overlooked an important point. Although they were composed in the vernacular, all of the new kinds of writings (such as songs and poems) containing the seeds of the alleged revolution remained firmly in the hands of clerical authors, who used the texts to communicate a specific message for a specific purpose. As noted by Thomas Fudge, this message was often propagandistic and fueled by a desire to gain the laity’s support over other groups of clerics and their followers.12 Fudge first opened up the role and function of the vernacular compositions and drew attention to their marvelous variety.
This book aims to rethink the role of religious instruction, literary production, and the blurring of social and ecclesiastical ranks by analyzing the entire spectrum of vernacular production, from songs and simple compositions to lengthy theological treatises, all of them already edited but never be fore made the subject of a book-length study. Reformers rarely reflected on their use of the vernacular, but what and when they chose to write in the vernacular speaks volumes about what they thought vernacular writings could accomplish. Vernacular writings coincided with, and largely affected, the formation of different factions, which coalesced around a few select questions of doctrine and ritual. Rather than to focus on the theological or philosophical arguments as such of these various writers, this book examines the role of these texts in the creation of symbols, myths, and rituals that forged allegiances and constructed enemies, thereby serving to solidify distinct religious communities.13 This is the first book to analyze a wider spectrum of Czech vernacular texts and their function in the religious controversies of the fifteenth century, focusing on how they challenged and transformed the Latinate culture.
Although there is extensive literature on Hussites, it is for the most part quite insular, relegating the movement to the eastern margins of European affairs or framing it in terms 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.