Fifteenth-century music and musical culture has enjoyed an exceptional position in Czech historiography. Narratives on the Hussite revolts against the Roman Church, which escalated after the death of Jan Hus at the stake in 1415, are accompanied by depictions of the powerful role of music cultivated in all social spheres—vernacular Czech liturgy in the Hussite church, religious songs in devotional and private cultures, and Hussite songs inciting men to fight without fear against their enemies. For more than a century, Czech music historians have been inspired by the undeniably strong social power of these musical repertories and have highlighted Hussite vernacular chant and vernacular song as the peak of Czech medieval music and cultural developments. Fifteenth-century chants have been used as melodic and symbolic material for countless nineteenth- and twentieth-century music compositions that evoke the Hussite legacy, and in this way they contributed to the shape of modern Czech identity.

Discovering and interpreting authentic documents, Czech music historians defined fifteenth-century Bohemia as a period in which the renowned “Czech musicality,” closely connected to the vernacular Czech language, was born and reached its first peak. However, Bohemia usually appears (if at all) in surveys on medieval and early Renaissance music as a truly peripheral region, which for a time and as a result of political events was separated from the musical life of western Europe and where music was literally conserved in a special microclimate.