Václav the Anonymous and Jan Pŕíbram: Textual Laments on the Fate of Religion in Bohemia (1424-1429)

Abstract

Religion in the pre-modern period has sometimes been a force of considerable importance. From time to time it has been regarded as part of the social fabric. Writing in the fourth century, the Cappadocian bishop Gregory of Nyssa describes the social prevalence of religion in the city of Constantinople. "The entire city is filled with it. In squares, market places, at the cross-roads, in alleyways. Old-clothes men, money changers, food sellers are all busy arguing. If you ask someone to give you change, he philosophizes about the Begotten and the Unbegotten; if you inquire about the price of a loaf of bread, you are told by way of reply that the Father is greater and the Son inferior; if you ask 'is my bath ready?' the attendant answers that the Son was made out of nothing." Fifteenth-century Bohemia is significantly removed from fourth-century Byzantium. Does the Gregorian observation have any viable religious parallel across more than a thousand years of history? It is tempting to resort to the racy tales of intrigue among the Czech religious reflected in the pages of a late fourteenth-century archiepiscopal visitation protocol carried out in the archdiocese of Prague and draw conclusions. Here we find stories of concubinage, immorality, drunkenness, clerical brothels and priests examining female bodies under pretense of effecting a cure. Sixteen of thirty-nine parish churches in Prague evidently had priests of notorious moral reputation. But the irregular lives of some priests cannot be used in isolation to assess the nature of religious life. Thousands of faithful pilgrims were making the trip from Bohemia to Wilsnack in Brandenburg to see the miraculous hosts preserved after a fire in 1383. Pilgrim badges from the Wilsnack faithful have been discovered in Bohemia. The future Pope Pius II remarked after visiting Bohemia that Czech women knew the Bible better than many Italian bishops. It is reputed that Jan Hus preached to as many as 3,000 hearers at a time on a regular basis. Clericalism abounded with some estimates judging that one in twenty in Prague belonged to the clerical orders.