With this volume, Zdeněk David follows up his earlier work on the long-term fate of the Bohemian Reformation and its consequences for Czech culture. While his 2003 study, Finding the Middle Way: The Utraquists’ Liberal Challenge to Rome and Luther (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press), looked at the history of the Utraquists in the context of the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, his current study seeks to trace the longer half-life of Utraquist ideas in the intellectual ferment of the Bohemian national revival of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Looking first at the historiography of the Bohemian national revival, he finds that recent scholarship has made little of the influence of Utraquist writings on later Bohemian nationalist thought, an oversight his work aims to remedy. David follows this survey by cataloguing the republication of sixteenth-century Utraquist “classics” in the late eighteenth century. He considers the reintroduction of these works among a reading public dedicated to reform and national awakening as critical to the development of Czech nationalist thought; the rereading of this literature introduced the ideas and vocabulary of the sixteenth-century Utraquists to a readership who embraced the tolerance, liberalism, and universalism embodied in the sixteenth-century texts. But given the changed circumstances of the late eighteenth century, the embrace of these ideas eventually stripped them of their theological dimensions, translating them into the context of Czech nationalism of the era. The secularizing of these values is sealed by the failure of the Catholic Enlightenment to push the Church in the direction congenial to its theological basis. David's careful attention to physical texts and their reception comes from his emphatic desire to avoid giving nationalism, or other -isms, a reified life of its own, and to trace the actual works and their concepts into the discourse of the late Enlightenment and Romantic era in Bohemia. He sees the mentality with which the intellectuals of the Bohemian Awakening approached the texts and events of the Utraquist movement as constituting a type of renaissance, congruent with the perspective of humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and their valorization of the texts and ideas of antiquity. He particularly rejects the conventional notion that German idealism played a significant role in the development of Czech nationalist perspectives, and he sees a continuity of Enlightenment influences in the Czech case, nurtured by their embrace of the Utraquist legacy. This was facilitated by the influence of Karl Seibt, Bernard Balzano, and Franz Exner, he argues, who were averse to the idealism of German philosophy, and passed on through their pedagogy and writings a prevailing emphasis on Enlightenment empiricism and realism, using the vocabulary and values of their Utraquist sources as one of their vehicles. Balzano, in particular, advocated an anti-Hegelianism that militated against the success of the German philosopher's ideas in the Czech setting. Finally, this tendency toward a universalist, liberal, and tolerant nationalism, which David sees situated in the intellectual currents of theology and philosophy within the Czech schools, lost its theological standing with the backlash against the Catholic Enlightenment within the post-1848 Church, so that its influence was felt only in secularized philosophy after that date—the Church would no longer serve as a carrier of this legacy. In the end, David wants to explain the persistence of a more tolerant and universalist nationalism among the Czechs, which he sees most tellingly exemplified in the success of Czechoslovakia's democratic regime during the 1920s and 1930s, when every other liberal regime that emerged from the post–World War I settlements had collapsed into authoritarianism and more rabid nationalisms. Ultimately he sees in this revival and persistent influence of a secularized Utraquist legacy one basis for a uniquely Czech identity.

David's book has much to recommend it. It is a model of clarity in its structure and language. Though he treats complicated historical processes and ideas, his arguments and treatment of philosophical issues sustains an economy of expression and a consistency of usage that compares favorably to much academic writing. The argument he pursues is substantive, and touches on a number of areas of significant interest. His attempt to trace the longer-term influence of ideas from the sixteenth century into the eras of Enlightenment and Romanticism models a method that improves upon the usual approach that simply assumes the persistence of ideas as universal entities. He demonstrates that texts and words from the sixteenth century had a tangible influence in educational systems and intellectual debate. In addition, the case of the Czech thinkers and their maneuvering within the intellectual environment created by the force of German culture, the political complications of the Austrian Empire, and the disciplinary systems of the Catholic Church is an interesting one. How incipient nationalisms established themselves among ethnic groups of east-central Europe in the era around 1800 has important implications for our understanding of the development of this region. So the interest of his work goes beyond just those who concern themselves with Czech history and identity. However, the work does suffer from some of the problems associated with most studies that seek to draw long-term influence for ideas across expansive time lines. It is hard for conceptual categories not to become things unto themselves—it is difficult when talking of “ontological realism” and “metaphysical pluralism” (219) not to turn concepts into concrete things. What the connection is between such categories and a cultural landscape or human behavior remains obscure in David's study; his work functions on the level of ideas, though he would like to see a broader significance for these ideas. Another potential issue with the work involves the exact significance of the Utraquist legacy that stands at the center of his study. It remains somewhat murky to what degree the legacy that he wishes to trace is a result of the reinvigoration of these ideas, and what comes out of an Enlightenment Catholicism. He refers to a partial influence for Utraquist idea at some points, though in other places it seems he would like to attribute a more fundamental impact to this legacy. The argument concerning its influence is not entirely convincing. However, these reservations are less flaws than they are the kind of questions that are stimulated by an ambitious work; David's study is valuable stimulus for those looking for another approach to the themes he broaches, and an important addition to historical understanding.