University of Pennsylvania Museum Publications Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion: Vernacular Writing and the Hussite Movement (The Middle Ages Series)

In early fifteenth-century Prague, disagreements about religion came to be shouted in the streets and taught to the laity in the vernacular, giving rise to a new kind of public engagement that would persist into the early modern era and beyond. The reforming followers of Jan Hus brought theological learning to the people through a variety of genres, including songs, poems, tractates, letters, manifestos, and sermons. At the same time, university masters provided the laity with an education that enabled them to discuss contentious issues and arrive at their own conclusions, emphasizing that they held the freedom to make up their own minds about important theological issues. This marketplace of competing religious ideas in the vernacular emerged in Bohemia a full hundred years before the Reformation. In Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion, Marcela K. Perett examines the early phases of the so-called Hussite revolution, between 1412, when Jan Hus first radicalized his followers, and 1436, the year of the agreement at the Council of Basel granting papal permission for the ritual practice of the Utraquist, or moderate Hussite, faction to continue. These were years during which the leaders of competing reform movements needed to garner the laity's support and employed the vernacular for that purpose, translating and simplifying basic theological arguments about the Bible, the church's ritual practice, and authority in the church. Perett illustrates that the vernacular discourse, even if it revolved around the same topics, was nothing like the Latin debates on the issues, often appealing to emotion rather than doctrinal positions. In the end, as Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion demonstrates, the process of vernacularization increased rather than decreased religious factionalism and radicalism as agreement about theological issues became impossible. Review "Marcela K. Perett rightly points out that most scholarship on the Hussite Revolution focuses on the clerical leadership of the movement and its attempts to communicate their political and theological messages to their opponents. Preachers, Partisans, and Rebellious Religion offers a welcome correction and complement by taking seriously how the clerical elite adapted their message through translation into the vernacular in order to persuade the laity to adopt certain positions and behaviors."—Phillip Nelson Haberkern, Boston University From the Author Marcela K. Perett teaches history at North Dakota State University. About the Author Marcela K. Perett teaches history at North Dakota State University. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. 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." This petition captured t