In this major study of the trial of Jan Hus, Thomas Fudge argues that Hus was properly convicted of heresy, in a legal process that was on the whole procedurally sound. His conclusions will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with Fudge's 2010 biography of the Bohemian reformer, which advanced exactly these claims. In the present study, however, he founds his case upon a remarkable breadth and depth of scholarship in canon law and in the history of the medieval Church's legal mechanisms for action against heresy. Fudge contends that, in order fully to understand events at Constance, they must be viewed as merely the closing phase in a protracted series of legal proceedings which had begun in 1410 at the papal Curia in Rome. What ultimately condemned Hus was less doctrinal unorthodoxy than his persistent refusal to subject his conscience to ecclesiastical authority, as manifested through (papal and conciliar) frameworks of law. This is a richly detailed study, particularly in its scrutiny of the key texts for the Hus case, and it is sure to become an indispensable resource for anyone concerned with the beliefs and fate of the Bohemian reformer. It should be added, however, that it is also a more committed account of its subject than its rather sober format suggests. Those readers of Fudge's previous study of Hus who, he assures us (p. xxi), mistook its author for ‘a right-wing Roman Catholic’ cannot have been paying attention. For Fudge's real point in arguing so forcefully that the fathers of Constance were, on their own terms, quite right to condemn a man to death for his sincerely-held beliefs is, of course, that we should judge those terms as fundamentally reprehensible. Hus's trial becomes in Fudge's account no mere object of study but a lens, powerful yet restricting: a lens to clarify but also exclude. His purpose is served by his decision to write throughout in the brutalist argot of contemporary American legalism, even when this appears on the face of it imperfectly suited to his fifteenth-century subject-matter. The legist Jan Jesenice, who acted as Hus's procurator at the Curia, thus becomes his ‘lead attorney’, ‘counsel for the defense’, Hus his ‘client’. Hus ‘dispatched a legal team’ to Rome while his enemies among the Prague clergy ‘filed a boilerplate complaint’ with their archbishop. And so on. The effect is to pit the book's protagonist, naïve yet heroic, against a Church reduced to mere legal forms and procedures: aridly mechanical, but simultaneously offering rich scope for manipulation by Hus's (here, invariably unscrupulous and self-seeking) foes, such as the ‘cunning and clever’ Michael de Causis (p. 184). Fudge's valedictory anecdote, of Luther promising to hang his infant son with his own hands should the latter ever become a lawyer (p. 343), is offered to the reader as a key to the institution that condemned Hus. If Fudge's ostensible subject matter is the trial of the reformer, his deeper business is with trying and condemning the late medieval Church itself.