The Hussite movement was defined by its theology in a way difficult for modern, or postmodern, readers to understand. The 1986 movie The Name of the Rose, based on Umberto Eco's (strangely bestselling) novel, featured a scene in which a roomful of angry Franciscans, Benedictines, Dominicans, and high ranking bishops and a cardinal had gathered to resolve a problem that had caused the church to reach a point of actually persecuting a minority of Franciscan friars. The debate, it was announced in dead seriousness, was whether Christ and His disciples did, or did not, own the purse that contained their pooled meagre resources. The effect in the movie is to cause incredulity in the audience. This was what had led to political unrest, the detective work of Inquisitors, and the prospect of accusations of heresy? But Eco's portrayal of the argument behind the Franciscan Poverty controversy was fairly accurate: some friars were indeed willing to go to the stake rather than admit that the early church had truck with property ownership. Our secular society's departure from the medieval world is so profound as to make it difficult to believe that people would risk their lives on such apparently trivial concerns. With the Hussites, the issue uniting the otherwise fractious alliance of Tábor and Prague was agreement that the standing church practice of not offering the consecrated wine to the laity was so serious as to merit taking up arms. In this chapter, I will describe the reasoning, and the consequent debates on this and other subjects that animated Hussitism.

The Four Articles of Prague of 1421 will serve as a general organizing point, because they contained the core of what the Hussites believed should define a Christian society. Three of these four articles were already being discussed in Prague in 1388, when Wyclif's works began to appear there. The fourth, the issue of lay access to the chalice, arose shortly after Jan Hus left Prague for his fateful trip to Konstanz. We will survey a broad range of thinkers, who represent an equally broad range of theological positions.

The place of the Hussites in Czech history has always been a source of controversy. From the defeat at White Mountain in 1620 to the period following Napoleon's defeat of the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Hussites were regarded as heretics. Statues of emperors continue to dot the empire's cities featuring a snake or dragon being trampled under the imperial foot; in Czech lands, the identity of that serpent was Hussite. Today, travellers will encounter shrines and statues dedicated to St. John Nepomuk, a fourteenth-century priest famous for refusing to divulge the information the queen had confessed to him to an angry King Václav of Bohemia. He was thrown from the Charles bridge to his death, and after White Mountain, was promoted as the perfect replacement to overcome the hagiographic cult of Hus.

Among the first scholars to pay serious attention to Hus and Hussitism were German church historians who identified them as forerunners of Protestantism. Attempts to identify the Hussites with Czech nationalism were not desirable for the Habsburgs, though. The Catholic identity of the Empire suffered from Napoleon's invasion and the ignominious defeat at Austerlitz, not far from Brno. Enlightenment secularism remained a threat to the Empire's hold over populations either prone to Protestantism, Eastern Orthodoxy, or those sceptical of Roman Catholic dogma. But the drama the Hussites inspired among Romantic era authors and artists had the same effect among the Czech intelligentsia that tales of medieval Scotland had on writers like Sir Walter Scott. Perhaps the most famous of the non-Czech works of this period is George Sand's Jean Ziska: Épisode de la guerre des Hussites. She developed an interest in the subject during a trip through the Czech lands, and when she wrote, she explained that Žižka was a real person, despite the drama and energy that cast him as such a Romantic figure.

When Josef Jungmann published his massive Czech–German dictionary in 1834–1839, the Czech language was regarded as little better than a bucolic patois by the German-speaking upper and middle classes. One of the figures instrumental in publishing this dictionary was František Palacký, now regarded as the founder of modern Czech historiography.

The possibilities for scholarly work on the Hussites are manifold, and thanks to the wealth of primary texts now readily available, are ripe for development. Additionally, the growing list of manuscripts on such electronic portals as the Enrich Manuscriptorium [manuscriptorium.com] invites the creation of editions of the great number of unedited primary sources, both in Latin and in Old Czech. As the historiography of the Hussites suggests, classifying the movement involves exploring one's own intellectual assumptions about social structure, social movements, and religious identity. Two questions arise: do the Hussites represent a revolution, and were they fundamentalist? Both seem particularly appropriate for our society, which continues to experience repercussions from the events in the Muslim world that are frequently described using both of these terms.

Jacques Derrida argued in his 1994 Spectres of Marx that the fall of the Soviet Union and Marxism as defined during the twentieth-century Cold War did not make Marx irrelevant or wrong. In fact, Marxism is now open to a reinterpretation given the confusing new realities introduced by globalism. Stu-dents of Derrida now perceive a new reaction to the crises and ambiguities consequent to the rise of corporations that are more powerful than nations. The species of revolution populating post-1989 history include populist rejections of state corruption, “fundamentalist” religious reaction to secularism, post-colonial recovery of popular identities—all of them valid means by which to describe Hussitism. The Marxist reading of revolt as a bottom-up reformulation of social structure has realized new dimensions with the end of the nation state as the main unit of social organization. The Hussites provide a good example by which to explore these new dimensions.

But many other social revolts had occurred in Europe before 1419, and the legitimacy of using the term “revolution” to describe the Hussites in a post-Soviet worldview is open to doubt. The thirteenth and fourteenth centuries saw popular revolts in English, Italian, French, and Flemish lands, revolts against king, emperor, and pope, and against the colonial control of one city or feudal holding over another. The radical Franciscans, the Cathars, and other lesser known religious minorities generated church-sponsored crusades within Europe long before trouble started in Bohemia.

This chapter will briefly survey the main events of the Hussite movement in the fifteenth century. This, in itself, is historiographically questionable, because although the fighting largely ended in 1435 at Lipany, the Hussite phenomenon continued to evolve into the Modern period. Complicating matters is the absence of historical narratives in English. The two most reputable accounts, those of Howard Kaminsky and Frederick Heymann, end with the death of Žižka in 1425. So, too, does the Chronicle of Laurence of Březova, the only account of the movement written by a Bohemian. There are much fuller accounts in Czech, of course, and František Šma-hel's three-volume study was translated into German in 2002, but for Anglophones, the only complete overview remains Jiři Kejř's The Hussite Revolution, which was published in Prague in 1988, and is not readily available.

The Hussite movement had its origins in the reign of the emperor Charles IV, who dominated mid-fourteenth-century Europe. Bohemia was situated in the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, which stretched from the Low Countries to Gdańsk, and from the Piedmont to the Adriatic, encompassing what is today Austria, Germany, Switzerland, Croatia, Slovenia, the Netherlands, and the Czech-speaking lands of Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Charles was the son of John the Blind of Luxembourg and Elizabeth of Bohemia, heiress of the Přemyslid dynasty that had once ruled the Czech lands. Though he was named Václav at birth, he took the name Charles to honour the French Charles IV, his uncle, with whom he lived in his youth. He ruled the lands of the Bohemian crown in the 1340s, but until he was elected Holy Roman Emperor in 1355, he was regarded as an insignificant figure in European politics. Charles had prepared a strong political base for himself in Bohemia, and established Prague as a city to rival Vienna with a rigorous expansion program. He built churches, the eponymous bridge spanning the Vltava (Moldau), and a magnificent stronghold just south of the city, Karlstejn, which remains one of Europe's famous castles. Most significantly for this narrative, he founded a university in Prague in 1348 which he intended to put his city on an intellectual par with Paris. His “Golden Bull” of 1356 provided the basis for the secure regulation of the selection of future emperors for the next four centuries.

On his return from a meeting in Munich with Hitler in 1938, Neville Chamberlain famously said, “How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is, that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas masks here, because of a quarrel in a far away country between people of whom we know nothing.” He was referring to tensions between ethnic Germans and Czechs in what was then Czechoslovakia which Hitler had used as an excuse to annex the Sudetenland. Eighty years later, the comment continues to irritate the Czechs, in large part because it remains accurate for much of the Anglophone world. Bookstore shelves groan with histories of England, France, Germany, and other familiar countries of Western Europe, and there are always plenty of histories of Russia nearby. But there are very few, if any, on the lands in between, aside from histories of the horrific fighting in the Second World War. The Western world maintains an incurious attitude about “Eastern Europe” that would have been foreign to Europeans of the fourteenth-and fifteenth-centuries. Then, the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania was the most powerful in Europe, the Holy Roman Empire stretched from the Low Countries to Hungary, and Prague was its Second City. Bohemia was an important, centrally located kingdom within the Empire, a midpoint between German- and French-speaking lands on the West, and Hungarian- and Slavic-speaking lands on the East.

Bohemia was torn apart by the Hussite phenomenon between 1419 and 1435, and all of Europe reacted with hor ror as its violence spread into Bavaria, Silesia, Moravia, and the Baltic states. Such violence usually accompanied wars between crowns or powerful lords, but here it was waged by lesser nobles, theologians, and commoners. In many histories of the Hussites, it has been common to push aside the theological justifications for the fighting as secondary, masking nationalist or economic issues that are the “real movers” in politics. This is due to the secularism that continues to define Western civilization, separating it from societies in which religion continues to dominate, notably the Muslim world. It is almost impossible to believe that common people would take up farm implements to meet mounted armoured knights in combat for access to the consecrated wine of the Eucharist. Surely there was more at stake than this?