Visual Heresy and the Communication of Ideas in the Hussite Reformation

Abstract

Drawing upon the perspectives and methods of contemporary social and cultural history, this article aims to examine and explain how ideas were spread in Hussite Bohemia, both in Prague and elsewhere, through the visual forms of communication. More specifically it also seeks to demonstrate why visual propaganda was an effective means of transposing ideas - many of them heretical - from university lecture halls to peasant cottages and from the sacred houses of ecclesiastical discourse to the profane back rooms of urban taverns. Moreover, this article will briefly consider this exchange of ideas in reverse, that is to say, from pub to church and from marketplace to university. Either way the exchange involved visual heresy in the communication of ideas.