Jan Hus: Religious Reform and Social Revolution in Bohemia

Abstract

In 1938 on the eve of World War Two, British prime minister Neville Chamberlain famously described the troubles in the former Czechoslovakia as 'a quarrel in a faraway country between people of whom we know nothing'. Many people know Jan Hus was burned alive as the result of a quarrel in a distant land between opposing factions but the details are often blurred. Anglo scholars and students are quite aware generally of Hus and his place in history but the subject is more often mentioned as something ancillary than formally studied. The burning of Hus electrified a nation. As the centuries passed the fires of a revolution which once commanded European-wide attention slowly went out. There are two reasons for this. First, Jan Hus is part of the problem of the 'Middle Ages': Invented by the Italians the term provided a means of disassociating the rebirth, or 'renaissance' of classical Greek and Roman culture from the millennium separating that classical age from its resurgence. These 'Middle Ages' were viewed as motionless history between towering eras of human achievement. The nineteenth-century French historian Jules Michelet contemptuously described the Middle Ages as a 'thousand years without a bath' a time of unspeakable ignorance, superstition and all manner of uncleanness.