Framing faith, forging a nation: Czech vernacular historiography and the Bohemian Reformation, 1430–1530

Abstract

This dissertation takes a new approach in the study of the Bohemian Reformation of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. It examines the religious attitudes of the Czech burgher class through a close study of the Old Czech Annals, a group of vernacular chronicles written by anonymous burghers in Prague and other Bohemian cities between c.1430 and 1530. These chronicles constitute a crucial historical source for late medieval and early modern Bohemia. In writing about the Bohemian Reformation and the Utraquist Church, the primary heir to the Hussite Revolution, scholars have frequently consulted portions of the Annals. Yet, as a collective, the Old Czech Annals have never previously been examined as a means of understanding the religious attitudes of their authors and readers, the lay middle classes who formed the backbone of the Utraquist Church. This dissertation, through a careful unraveling and analysis of the many strands of the Old Czech Annals, finds a Czech burgher class that was self-confident enough to form its own ideas and opinions concerning religious reform, rather than relying on the perspectives of the clerical elite.

After an historical and textual introduction, Chapter One provides an overview of the main themes in the Bohemian Reformation. Intertwined with the historical overview, Chapter One examines the image which the chroniclers projected of the proper Utraquist Church and its rivals, the Roman Catholics and the Taborites. Chapter Two examines how the lay annalists, more than their clerical leaders, sought to revive one of the most popular aspects of Catholic piety, the cult of the saints. In this effort, the annalists strove to create new saints who could best represent the values of the Utraquist reform. Chapter Three examines the annalists' perception of the incipient Protestant Reformation. While the annalists feared the threat to the social order that the Reformation represented, they embraced some Protestant reformers as bridging figures who might draw Germans into the Utraquist fold. Finally, Chapter Four examines how the annalists used the rhetoric of nationality to bolster the cause of reform, and as a means of developing a Czech-Utraquist national identity.