According to František Šmahel, the editor of this impressive and useful compendium of essays, the figure of Jan Hus has since the mid-twentieth century been reinvented in the scholarly literature roughly every twenty years. And as other contributors eloquently show, multiple, competing incarnations of the Bohemian reformer – both heretic and popular saint from the day of his death – were in existence long before that. Early Protestants greeted him as their harbinger and first martyr (though, as Zdeněk David here explains, Luther was less impressed than is sometimes claimed). Figures as diverse as George Sand and the young Benito Mussolini saluted Hus as one of the first modern European revolutionaries. Modern Czech nationalists, of both bourgeois and Communist stripes, rallied behind him, while the prolific Bohemian-German medievalist Johann Loserth (d. 1936) denounced him as a mere epigone of Wyclif. At the close of the twentieth century, moves by the Catholic Church to review Hus’ heresy conviction could still excite controversy.

When read against this troubled backdrop, a notable characteristic of the essays comprising the present volume is their restrained, even cautious, tone. Polemic and dogma are strikingly absent. Notable, too, in a scholarly field so long and so avidly cultivated, is their repeated emphasis upon problems still unresolved, either because the necessary sources have yet to be fully exploited or because too few exist. Even the substantial concluding chapter, by Šmahel, explicitly shuns the term ‘conclusion’, redirecting attention instead at those aspects of Hus’ life and legacy where debate continues. The ten substantial essays that precede it, all by established experts in their respective fields, focus particularly upon Hus as preacher and theologian, while also devoting substantive attention to his posthumous commemoration and influence. All take scrupulous account of the most recent specialist scholarship. As is therefore to be expected, they offer judgements more complex and less stark than did many of Hus’ past champions and detractors. Pavel Soukup, on Hus as preacher, emphasises how little the surviving texts of his sermons can reveal about their delivery or about his (reputedly exceptional) qualities as a pulpit orator. Stephen E. Lahey finds in Hus’ commentary on Peter Lombard's Sentences the work of a capable but hardly an original theologian, whose positions, even on the eucharist, were largely conventional. Paula Rycherová, in a study of Hus’ vernacular theology, similarly discovers a more moderate Hus than the figure condemned at Constance. For František Šmahel, examining his social doctrines, Hus offered no fundamental challenge to the established feudal order, even while he denounced its specific abuses. Sebastián Provvidente shows how the process leading to his conviction for heresy at Constance was impelled less by Hus' own teachings than by the imperative facing the council Fathers, of establishing their authority to pronounce on matters of faith and law. David Holeton and Hana Vlhová, writing on Hus’ relationship with liturgy and music, judge his reputation as a composer of devotional songs to be overstated. His afterlife, too, is cut down to size. Milena Bartová finds only a fairly limited corpus of post-mortem iconography, while Zdeněk David highlights Hus' relatively modest importance for later religious thought.

Despite all this, Hus nevertheless emerges with aspects of his historical significance reaffirmed and even enhanced. A long chronological essay by Ota Pavlíček synthesises recent scholarship on the phases of his life and career. Šmahel emphasises the importance of Hus’ orthographic innovations for the early development of a written Czech vernacular (as well as crediting him with introducing the index to Bohemia). In his essay on Hus’ political theology, Šmahel demonstrates the centrality of ideas of a linguistically-defined Czech nation to his public utterances. Purity of faith and purity of language were closely linked in Hus’ thinking, and he denounced as a contemporary abuse the intrusion of foreign – he meant specifically German-speaking – clergy, ignorant of the speech of those entrusted to their care. An important essay by the late Vilém Herold argues for the necessity of understanding Hus as marking the culmination of a Prague-based tradition of preaching and reforming thought originating around the middle of the fourteenth century. Indeed, all the main routes here lead back to Prague. It is against the city's backdrop that the transitions of Hus’ thought and teaching are traced, from the lecture hall to the pulpit to the street. (Hus’ enemies blamed him personally for the Ten Commandments becoming the subject of a Prague tavern song.) In particular, these essays return repeatedly to the vast preaching space of the Bethlehem Chapel – which, it is estimated, could accommodate around a tenth of the population of the Bohemian capital. It was there that both Hus’ several audiences and his multi-media communications with them found a focus. (One contributor compares the mural excerpts from his writings placed there to PowerPoint slides.)

Given the character and focus of this learned and judicious collection of studies, it is understandable that the reader seeks largely in vain for broader European landscapes within which to view and understand Hus, his doctrines and his fate. Such vistas are properly the matter of a different volume – but a necessary, and still-awaited, one. If Hus, his career and its interpretations illuminate one thing, then it is surely the capacity of transnational structures and ties – the universities, the cross-border traffic in scholars, books and ideas, the universal Church and its late medieval crises – to nurture highly particular loyalties and identities. Hus has much to reveal both about the openness of late medieval frontiers and about the circumstances of their closure. Broad perspectives on the Prague doctor were never more needed than now.