The subject of Zdeněk David's study is the fate of the Bohemian Utraquist church. The formal name of the church was derived from the Latin phrase sub utraque specie (under each of two kinds). This means to take lay communion in the form of wine as well as bread, contrary to the rules of the Church of Rome. David treats the topic with great sympathy—a sympathy that could be dangerous for the author's objectivity. David avoids this danger by working methodically as well as scientifically in a serious way. His book is a voluminous study of impeccable scholarship showing profound erudition, including an enormous number of notes, a useful glossary, an appendix, indices, and a bibliography referring to many primary works in Czech, German, and Latin. There are 235 pages of critical apparatus and 245 pages of text. Even though the critical apparatus is quite extensive, it does not feel like a burden or an annoyance but rather a helpful and serious offer to check all his claims. Thus, the sympathy of the author for his subject transfers to the reader, and the history of the Bohemian Reformation and its reawakening becomes an exciting story.

David focuses on three historical periods: (1) the Bohemian Reformation since the execution of Jan Hus 1415–1622; (2) the Czech National Awakening 1773–1848; and, (3) its reflection in the historiographical literature from 1945 until 2010. In the first period, David sees tolerance and liberalism, universalism, and “plebeianism” (downgrading social privileges) as the main structures of Utraquist thinking and behavior, which tried to follow a via media between orthodox Roman Catholicism and Protestantism. The battle of White Mountain in 1620 brought the victory of the imperial Catholic party of Emperor and King Ferdinand II over the rebellious Bohemian estates. This led to the baroque Counter Reformation, which was a kind of cultural destruction including book-burning, the extinction of the high-level Czech language of the Bohemian Reformation, and the expulsion of Lutheran and Brethren clergy from the country. The return to Rome's papal power was executed by the Jesuit Order. Utraquist priests had to return to the post-tridentine Roman church. David defends them against the reproaches of liability, sycophancy, and provincialism during the period of darkness (temno) of the Counter Reformation and refers to a subsidiary Utraquist undercurrent, defending philosophical realism and individualism, and retaining a common sense of tolerance, universalism, and plebeianism.

During the second period, over a gap of almost two centuries, Utraquist ideas survived in the shadow. They were first rediscovered timidly under Bohemian Queen Maria Theresa (1740–80) during the period of Austro-Bohemian Catholic Enlightenment under Emperor and King Joseph II. This renaissance of Utraquist culture based itself on the sixteenth-century writings and their intricate language-standards in the Bohemian Reformation, which at the same time supported national awakening in Bohemia. During the reign of Joseph II (co-regent 1765–80, 1780–90), the rehabilitation of Hus and Utraquism was in full swing within the Catholic Enlightenment (Reformkatholizismus), and the awakeners had the official support of the governmental apparatus of the Habsburg monarchy in opposition to “ultramontaneous” Roman ecclesiastical policy. David traces this subsidiary current in Bohemia, which saved Austro-Bohemian Catholic Enlightenment from being drowned in the prevailing philosophical mainstream of German Idealism from Kant to its acme in Hegel's philosophy and German-styled Romanticism. Still Austro-Bohemian Catholic Enlightenment always remained on the firm ground of empiricism and realism. David sees Bernard Bolzano (1781–1848) rightly as the key figure in this philosophical resistance. Bolzano's enculturation happened in the very center of the Bohemian Catholic Enlightenment, in Prague, accompanied by its most eminent figures, like Karl Raphael Ungar and Joseph Dobrovsky.

Resistance against the philosophical mainstream required a lot of stability and steadfastness, so where did he gain it? Here David's argumentation weakens slightly: He does not realize that Bolzano was primarily a mathematician and scientist and at the same time a devout priest. First, as David sees the baroque period only as a somber time of Counter Reformation, he cannot verify that baroque thinking succeeded in overcoming opposites like belief and proof, as Pascal, Newton, and Leibniz had shown, thus opening the way to modern infinitesimal mathematics. Second, as David sees the Jesuits simply as executors of papal power, he does not realize that they did not only suppress Lutheranism and free thinking but also installed a very solid system of scientific-based scholastic education, which was the firm ground of education in the excellent Austrian school system. With all sympathy, this has to be added, because it was mathematics that made Bolzano resist all the intellectual dangers arising with the new German way of philosophizing. Bolzano saw the crucial problems of idealistic philosophy in its logical errors and confusion of terms, as well as in the division of religious and scientific thinking, whereby religious belief was downgraded to a mere emotional attitude. On the other hand, Bolzano came up with important results concerning the discovery of mathematical infinity, showing that infinity is not only an attribute of God but also a provable mathematical fact.

The advanced standard of Bolzano's analytical mind allowed him to introduce new mathematical and logical methods into philosophy and science of religion (Religionswissenschaft), for example, defining eternity for instance as a lack of development and past. According to Bolzano, one of the crucial problems with Germen Idealism was the fact that Hegel was not only a bad mathematician but also a dreamer. Bolzano regarded the idealistic influences as quite atrocious to young thinkers. Moreover, Bolzano fought against religious indifference. For him the clarification of religious concepts and terms was an absolute necessity, thereby saving the religious substance of the theory of Bohemian Reformation and raising it up to the level of post-baroque standards. As David mentions, the national awakening in Bohemia failed to save this spiritual substance. The awakeners left Bolzano's path and followed the way of Jungmann's German-imported Czech nationalism.

During the third period, resistance against the triumphant progress of German Idealism was difficult. It was also a struggle against contemporary historiography, which appears in the Marxist-Leninist interlude, as well as in the later nationalist interpretations. All this historiography is full of prejudices and clichéd assertions of a general intellectual backwardness of the Habsburg monarchy, which also seems to correspond to its lack of economic development and religious conservatism. Historiography usually was not aware of this important subsidiary stream of intellectual consciousness. David discusses this phenomenon in many examples: He proves the overestimated influence of Herder's proto-romantic philosophy of history. He refuses the simple equation of idealism with philosophy or even with thinking in general, and he also rejects the frequent claim that nineteenth-century Austria lacked any kind of philosophy (philosophy here identified with idealism). David recognizes Austrian Analytic philosophy (Bolzano, Brentano, Husserl, Mach, Wiener Kreis, up to Wittgenstein, Popper, etc.) in the twentieth century as a product of this “subculture.” This philosophical development could not have happened without Bolzano's work with its roots in the Austro-Bohemian Enlightenment. The common lack of historical understanding of this matter evidently led David to the great task of clarifying the Bohemian Reformation and its awakening. All in all his study marks a decisive step forward in Austro-Bohemian historiography.