Following the excellent Companion to Jan Hus in 2015, Brill has wisely seen fit to carry on the fascinating and understudied role of the Bohemian Reform in the context of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Europe. Michael Van Dussen and Pavel Soukup's A Companion to the Hussites encapsulates the momentous shift in the international study of the Hussites in just the last twenty years. Van Dussen and Soukup are two of the field's most active scholars, who have justifiably assumed significant roles in guiding the course of international scholarship concerning Hussite history. This work highlights seismic changes in the field as the study of late medieval and early modern Bohemia expands beyond Czech borders and narrative histories to incorporate a growing body of international and interdisciplinary scholars. This international group of scholars demonstrates the value of new methodologies, documents, and questions to examining one of the most pivotal but least studied movements of European history. This companion provides an invaluable snapshot of an ongoing renaissance of Hussite studies, even if it does not necessarily break significant new ground itself.

Unsurprisingly, when tackling a topic with the depth and complexity of Hussite era religion, Van Dussen and Soukup have attempted to categorize major themes in five parts: “Influences,” “Major Figures,” “Religious Politics,” “Theology and Religious Practice,” and “Later Developments.” All sections have two contributions each while the fourth, “Theology and Religious Practice,” contains three separate contributions. In addition, each of the individual contributors have also organized their topics through numerous subheadings within their own sections. This style of organization means that the text rarely confronts the reader with more than two pages of uninterrupted material. The companion, therefore, serves its purpose as an excellent reference for brief synopses of individuals and themes of the movement, but consequently it also never seems more than to scratch the surface of many topics.

All the included scholars have made significant contributions to the field, including several groundbreaking monographs and articles on their respective topics. The chapters in this companion amount to summaries of their otherwise significant works. One great benefit of having scholars revisit and summarize topics is that now Anglophones have access to some outstanding Czech scholars. For example, I hope that the brief twenty pages included from scholars like Pavlína Cermanová will encourage others to engage and utilize her outstanding 400-page Čechy na Konci Věků (Argo, 2013) (Bohemia at the End of the Ages) when addressing broader themes of medieval eschatology. Despite the necessary brevity of the contributions for a companion of this nature, a budding scholar in Hussite studies could not ask for better than a summary from Steven Lahey on Wyclif in Bohemia, a work in English from Ota Halama on the Unity Brethren, or the legacy of the Hussites in the broader European Reformation by Philip Haberkern. Comparing these summaries to the monographs written by these authors, however, makes it clear just how limited they were in highlighting their expertise. The Companion is an excellent text to begin with, a text I would have dearly loved to have had when I began my own research into the Hussites in 2000. I hope readers and budding scholars recognize that the Companion is merely a starting point.

If the short essays do not make the limitations of this companion abundantly clear, the fantastic updated thematic bibliographies demonstrate both the depth and energy that permeates the field of Hussite religious studies. Each chapter includes an outstanding list of primary and secondary sources for one wishing to dig deeper into Hussite literature. Furthermore, every essay concludes with a brief historiographic update to the field, and although to say “further research is required” about one's topic is certainly a common trope, many of these contributors conclude with generous advice on where scholars new to the field might pick up the mantle and begin to advance the field even further.

Michael Van Dussen and Pavel Soukup successfully constructed this volume as a glimpse of the state of the field in modern Hussite scholarship; to that purpose, the intellectual and religious legacy of the Hussite movement dominate this work. What this volume only lightly touches on is the social consequences and periods of violence that were a hallmark of much earlier scholarship on the Hussite period. Admittedly, these were the themes most investigated by twentieth-century scholars like in Howard Kaminsky's A History of the Hussite Revolution (University of California Press, 1967), Fredrick Heymann's Life of John Žižka (Princeton University Press, 1955), and Josef Macek's Hussite Revolution (Orbis, 1958). These authors were heavily Marxist in their approach or, in the case of Heymann, writing a heroic biography. Scholars have built on this foundation and explored a myriad of new topics, as evidenced by this companion, but even when examining the religious legacy of the Hussites, it seems like questions of religious violence and social upheaval might also require updating. As the editors point out in their introduction, quite extensive works in Czech by František Šmahel and Petr Čornej influenced much of the current scholarship in the field, but their own work on the Hussites remains unaddressed in this companion while remaining inaccessible to those without Czech. Should not a companion of the Hussites include a consideration of religious violence?

In summary, this companion is useful and exciting but hardly comprehensive. Still, this work is a crucial achievement and a critical component for directing the field of Hussite studies going forward. As we begin our advance through more than a decade of the 600-year anniversaries in Hussite history, scholars will cite this work repeatedly and build upon it as a starting point for years to come.