The Bohemian Reformation and “The” Reformation: Hussites and Protestants in Early Modern Europe

Home , Bohemian Reformation, Hussites, Hussite Wars

Phillip Haberkern

1 Introduction

Historians have long struggled to delineate the relationship between the movement for religious reform that exploded in the Czech lands during the 1400s and the various reformations that emerged across Europe in the follow- ing century. Were the Hussites the embodiments of a “First Reformation” that set political precedents and established theological templates for the “Second Reformation” of Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin?1 Alternatively, did the Hussites represent a sort of “Premature Reformation” that ultimately foundered on its inability to distance itself from the liturgical framework and institutional hier- archy of Catholicism?2 Both of these interpretations are loaded with overtones of national self-assertion and undertones of confessional claims about what constituted a true reformation in early modern Europe, and scholars have, in recent decades, happily escaped from these restrictive historiographical tropes. But if we attribute neither primacy nor prematurity to the Bohemian Reformation, then how should it be understood in relation to the 16th-century reform movements that both scholars and the world at large conventionally consider “the” Reformation? To answer this question, it is necessary to under- stand the Bohemian Reformation’s dual status as both an idealized historical construct among 16th-century reformers and a historical process that was still unfolding at that time. By playing off a perception that was founded on both textual representations and actual interactions, Czech “Hussites” were able to

1 The great champion of this position was Amedeo Molnár, who identified both the Hussites and Waldensians as the champions of the “First Reformation.” See, e.g. his: “Husovo místo v evropské reformaci,” Československý časopis historický 14 (1966): 1–14 and Die Waldenser. Ge schichte und europäisches Ausmaß einer Ketzerbewegung, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: 1980), especially 280–99. 2 This terminology was most famously used in Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation. Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: 1988). Cf. the discussion of this terminology in František Šmahel, “Zur Einführung. Häresie und vorzeitige Reformation – causa ad disputan- dum,” in Häresie und vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter, ed. František Šmahel (Mu- nich: 1998), vii–xiv.

404 Haberkern achieve a parity with their newly reformed neighbors that was unprecedented within the inter-confessional dynamics of the 16th century. On the one hand, the Czech churches’ status derived from the Hussite movement’s prominent place within a history that the anti-Roman movements of the 16th century were creating for themselves. Working backwards from the present to the biblical past, Protestants claimed the Hussites as a key link between themselves and the apostolic, true church that had been driven under- ground by papal tyranny; the Hussites also served as the most recent example of how a coalition of witnesses to divine truth and pious political elites could resist this diabolical oppression.3 Catholics, conversely, pointed to the destruc- tion of the Hussite Wars and the century of enmity that had followed in their wake as a warning to the faithful about the inescapable, tragic consequences of tolerating religious dissent.4 Second-generation Protestants from England to Geneva also looked to the Hussite movement and the martyrs it produced as having inaugurated the heroic renewal of the church in the last age, thus add- ing an eschatological element to the invocation of the Hussites among 16th- century reformers.5 No matter which groups claimed the Hussites, though, all of them ultimately constructed an idealized version of the Bohemian Refor- mation and its protagonists that came to serve as a lynchpin for the historical traditions and apocalyptic expectations that Protestants were formulating.6

3 A number of specific studies analyse the early Lutheran appropriation of the Hussites, and especially Jan Hus, as forerunners of their movement. On this appropriation, see the recent essays by Gustav Adolf Benrath, “Die sogenannten Vorreformatoren in ihrer Bedeutung für die frühe Reformation,” in Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch, ed. Bernd Moeller (Gütersloh: 1998), 157–66; and Thomas Kaufmann, “Jan Hus und die frühe Reforma- tion,” in Biblische Theologie und historisches Denken. Wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Studien, aus Anlass der 50. Wiederkehr der Basler Promotion von Rudolf Smend, eds. Martin Kessler and Martin Wallraff (Basel: 2008), 62–109. 4 On these arguments, see Hubert Jedin, “Die geschichtliche Bedeutung der katholischen Kon- troversliteratur im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung,” Historisches Jahrbuch 53 (1933): 70–97; and David Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents. Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 (Minne- apolis: 1991). 5 On the proliferation of martyrologies among Protestant authors, see Robert Kolb, For All the Saints. Changing Perceptions of Martyrdom and Sainthood in the Lutheran Reformation (Ma- con, GA: 1987); Brad Gregory, Salvation at Stake. Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: 1999); and Peter Burschel, Sterben und Unsterblichkeit. Zur Kultur des Martyri ums in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: 2004). 6 The concept of invented traditions here derives from Eric J. Hobsbawm, “Introduction: In- venting Traditions,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric J. Hobsbawm and Terence O. Rang- er (Cambridge and New York: 1983), 1–14. On this process of invention in the Protestant reformations, see Euan Cameron, “Medieval Heretics as Protestant Martyrs,” in Martyrs and Martyrologies, ed. Diana Wood (Cambridge: 1993), 185–207.