Battle for the public mind: John Hus and Hussite movement

This dissertation studies the emergence and public appeal of the Hussite religious and political movement in fifteenth-century Bohemia. It explores the question how theological and philosophical ideas inspired distinct religious groups and how they shaped their identities. At the heart of my dissertation is the question how did they succeed when across Europe many others, likewise deemed "heretics," failed? In its own time, the Hussite movement proved eminently successful: John Hus's ideas gained a large following, and after Hus's death in 1415, incidents of violence against the Roman church coalesced into a full-scale military rebellion. The Hussites succeeded in fighting off successive armies of Crusaders and, eventually, even gained the grudging approval of a church council to continue their own particular religious practices, of which the practice of communion in both kinds was the most important. My dissertation shows that the Hussites relied on carefully constructed narratives, which they (quite intentionally) used as a weapon in the conflict that engulfed fifteenth-century Bohemia.;The five chapters of the dissertation each documents an attempt (successful or not) to win the public in favor of a religious idea. Chapters 1 and 2 reinterpret the career of John Hus, analyzing his strategies for creating a body of lay supporters committed to his agenda. Chapter 3 explores the ways in which Hus's successors employed vernacular compositions in order to disseminate their message of reform. In doing so, these university masters manipulated the memory of Hus in order to make their own message more appealing and more authoritative, underwritten by the sanctity of the martyred Hus. Chapter 4 analyzes two Latin histories written about the Hussite era, by Lawrence of Brzezova and Aeneas Piccolomini, both of whom shaped their narrative of events according to their particular agenda. The final chapter investigates the commune at Tabor and the explores the reason why it was so universally hated by both the Romanist and the Hussite factions.