'The Shouting Hus': Heresy Appropriated as Propaganda in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

On 6 July, 1415 the Prague university professor, parish priest and condemned heretic Jan Hus was executed by order of the Council of Constance. He died singing. The grotesque comedy of a man wearing a dunce cap standing on a burning pyre chained to a post transmitted enough raw emotion to influence an entire nation. The result was the Bohemian Reformation and the Hussite Revolution. The blood of the martyr produced seed. The ink of the scholar brought forth substance and the 'man' made 'saint' in the hands of others gave birth to a myth that whispered in Prague, sang in Constance and shouted across Europe.