Thomas Fudge, can claim an unusual connection with the subject of his book. Towards the close (p. 233) he reveals how in 1999 he wrote to Pope John Paul ii, at the time engaged in reviewing the Hus case, to urge that the Bohemian theologian's heresy conviction be allowed to stand. This action, readers can be sure, did not arise from sympathy on Fudge's part with the institutions and practices of the late medieval Church. Of Hus's judges at Constance he maintains (pp. 144–5), ‘there is certainly no excuse for their behaviour’, which was ‘excessive and malicious’. Instead, he presents Hus's title of heretic as something like a badge of honour, not to be stripped away by the ecumenical expediencies – or to use Fudge's own favoured and repeated term, ‘political correctness’ – of the expiring twentieth century. This, then, is a book with an agenda. It is also, however, a substantial and serious study of Hus (the first in English for over forty years), offering much of value. Fudge's analysis rests upon a commanding knowledge of the Bohemian reformer's own works and wide familiarity with the multilingual scholarship bearing on them. He illuminates well the influences which shaped Hus's thinking, emphasising the importance of Augustine (and cautioning against overstating that of Wyclif). He offers clarity on the nature and limits of Hus's heresy, which he locates particularly in the Bohemian's willing defiance of ecclesiastical authority. Hus's relationship with the eucharistic reform movement in Bohemia (marginal, and largely an accident of circumstances) is well explained. In particular, Fudge makes a powerful case both for Hus's significance as a preacher and pastor and for his limitations as a theologian. His assessment of his subject, admiring and at times outspokenly partisan, is also realistic. Both as thinker and as judge of his times and circumstances Hus was notably flawed. Fudge exposes inconsistencies and ambiguities in his arguments and shows how his positions shifted over time. Hus, moreover, was ‘provincial in nearly every respect’ (p. 243). Fudge is right to insist that he be viewed in the context of his times. However, that context is less well delineated than are Hus's own writings. It is as intellectual and spiritual biography that this book works best, whereas the complex interactions of events, individuals and groups with developments in society, politics and the Church in Bohemia are not communicated with equivalent clarity. Fudge's determination to defend his subject against anachronistic charges of Czech nationalism results in Hus's central part in enacting the 1409 decree of Kutná Hora, effectively excluding Germans from the University of Prague, going largely unexplained. The writing is at times agitated: the slow appearance of a long-awaited edition of Hus's works is denounced as ‘disgraceful’ (p. 210). More seriously, late medieval polemic tends to fuse with the author's own judgements, and the highly contentious remarks of others to be reproduced without endorsement but also without challenge. This is a book constrained but also energised and enriched by its author's passions.