The attention of European scholars focusing on Czech medieval history is drawn in particular to the phenomenon of the Hussite movement. The New Zealand historian Thomas A. Fudge is a prominent Hussitologist. The book reviewed here offers a reprint of seventeen of his studies. Most of them were originally published in the Czech Republic, with others in Germany, Canada, Belgium and Poland in journals of various kinds, as well as in conference proceedings. The common theme of the essays is the particulars of the Hussite heresy in the context of late medieval Europe.

The collection is introduced by a theoretical essay in which Fudge tries to bring heresy into the context of the development of society, laying emphasis, for example, upon the endeavour to uphold proper doctrine and the existing social order. In particular, the author enters into a dispute with Howard Kaminski, who was sceptical about use of the concept of ‘heresy’. Fudge asks what role heresy played in the late Middle Ages in a divided Christendom. He points out that medieval heresies cannot be rejected as simple fallacies. Such heresies arose from the belief that the Church had forsaken its apostolic beginnings. At the same time, the presence of heresy intensified the pressure for reform within the Church itself. Fudge's conclusion is in line with Czech historiography, which interprets the Waldensians and Hussites as instigators of the first European reformation. In the next essay, Fudge highlights the key role played by the concept of the law of God in Hussite thinking. He analyses how this concept was employed by reformers and thinkers of the pre-Hussite, Hussite and post-Hussite epochs (in particular by Matěj of Janov, Jan Milíč of Kroměříž, Mikuláš of Dresden, Wycliffe, Jan Hus, Mikuláš Biskupec and Petr Chelčický) and by Hussite military leaders (Jan Žižka). Fudge emphasises the importance of the thesis of the law of God for the expansion of popular piety in Bohemia. An extreme consequence was iconoclasm, destruction and death. As the author asserts, the popular Hussite movement helped to establish institutional heresy in Bohemia. An inseparable part of any heretical or reformist movement is eschatological expectation. Fudge points out that the response of Hussites to the dread of the imminent Apocalypse was of a collective and social nature. It included frequent eucharist, the chalice for the laity and devotion to Holy Scripture.

After describing the connections of late medieval heresy in Flanders with Czech Hussitism and the Picards, Fudge then deals with the question of the relationship between warfare and martyrdom from the Hussite perspective. As he states, people in fifteenth-century Bohemia wished to enter into the fellowship of God and God's martyrs. Fudge also sets his mind to the issue of Taborite communism. (Under the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia, this topic was highlighted and emphasised in the dominant Marxist historiography of the time.) The author claims that the principal tendencies were more theological than social, and were primarily religious, not economic. In another study Fudge points out that, like the Catholic Church, the Hussites had martyrs of their own and presents a list of such martyrs, focusing his attention on the Prague preacher Jan Želivský. In the following article, Fudge ponders on the texts of Václav Anonym (‘Václav, Havel and Tábor, or a discourse concerning Bohemia’) and Jan Příbram (‘The Lives of the Taborite priests’), which reflect critically on the Hussite Tábor. The subjects of further essays include crime, punishment and pacifism in the thinking of the Taborite bishop Mikuláš of Pelhřimov and the figure of the Hussite military leader Jan Žižka. Fudge also reflects on the issue of Czech nationalism in connection with the Hussite Revolution, Hussite infant communion and the context of Hussite propaganda. Finally, he deals with the ‘Historica Bohemica’ written by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (the future Pope Pius ii), and with the Utraquistic Lower Consistory in Prague between the years 1437 and 1497. The book concludes with addenda, corrigenda and indices of persons and places.

In short, this book presents a collection of valuable articles which, as a consequence, will be more easily accessible to a specialist public. It can be recommended not only to Bohemicists, but also to the larger community of academics interested in heresy in the Middle Ages and in church history in general.