The Night of Antichrist: Popular Culture, Judgement and Revolution in Fifteenth-Century Bohemia

Abstract

Apocalyptic traditions remained a common theme in the religious movements of the sixteenth century. Similar traditions in Hussite Bohemia are among the origins and influences necessary for understanding the 'Sitz im Leben' of the European reformations. In the Bohemian milieu political, economic and social forces were at work together with the stirrings of religious revival. Indeed, the impetus and real motive behind the Hussite movement was the eschatological expectation of a new heaven and a new earth coinciding with the end of the world. This impetus and motive was exacerbated by the onset of the "night of Antichrist," which by the time of the execution of Master Jan Hus had shrouded Bohemia in a lowering cloud of apocalyptic angst. The amalgamation of church wealth, a secularized Christianity begun by the Donation of Constantine, the papal schism, deviance from the law of God in teaching and practice, together with the suffering of the righteous were among the criteria for an identification of Antichrist. A variety of conditions in Bohemia satisfied these criteria.