Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (96 page)

Wyclif's followers, first Oxford academics, then a wider circle of clergy and laypeople influenced by the first university enthusiasts, were given the contemptuous nickname of 'Lollards': that is, mumblers who talked nonsense.
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They became mixed up with the losing side in early-fifteenth-century English politics, and now Crown and Church could combine in purging Lollard influence from the universities and among politically significant people. With just one permanent political backer, the Lollard story might have been very different, and more like that of the movement started a century later by another university lecturer, Martin Luther. Instead, Lollardy's repression included one feature unique to England. Wyclif's Oxford admirers had followed his teaching on the unchallengeable authority of the Bible by producing the first complete translation of the Vulgate into English, so that all might have a chance to read it and understand it for themselves. In 1407 all existing versions of the Bible in English were officially banned by the English Church hierarchy, and no replacement was sanctioned until Henry VIII's Reformation in the 1530s. In the intervening period, only the most obviously ultra-respectable could get away with open possession of a vernacular Bible, and indeed, their respectability seems itself to have made their copy of the text respectable.
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No other part of Europe went to such lengths, even though that great activist and reformer Jean Gerson did propose a general ban on Bible translations to the Council of Konstanz; he was worried that the laity would spend too much time reading for themselves and not listen to the clergy's increasingly generous supply of preaching. In most of Europe, when printing technology arrived in the early fifteenth century, the supply of vernacular Bibles hugely increased: the printers sensed a ready market and hastened to supply it in languages which would command large sales. Between 1466 and 1522 there were twenty-two editions of the Bible in High or Low German; the Bible reached Italian in 1471, Dutch in 1477, Spanish in 1478, Czech around the same time and Catalan in 1492. In 1473-4 French publishers opened up a market in abridged Bibles, concentrating on the exciting stories and leaving out the more knotty doctrinal passages, and this remained a profitable enterprise until the mid-sixteenth century. Bernard Cottret, Calvin's biographer, has suggested that this huge increase in Bibles created the Reformation rather than being created by it.
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The suppression of Lollardy by no means ended talk of reforming the Church in England. Since at least the eleventh century, it had been one of the best-regulated parts of the Western Church, and accordingly had bred many clergy with ultra-rigorous standards, who were not going to cease lamenting clerical faults just because Wyclif had been part of the stream of lamentation. Yet to do so brought new risks: the English Church authorities were so traumatized by the Wyclif episode that they were liable to regard any criticism as heretical. Even a well-meaning and conscientious Bishop of Chichester, Reginald Pecock, was accused of heresy in 1457-8. He was forced to resign and recant because he chose to defend the Church against Lollardy by privileging reason over the authority of scripture and the Fathers of the early Church; moreover, contrary to Gerson, he questioned the value of preaching without the laity doing their own reading to reinforce the message from the pulpit.
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English Lollardy survived through personal networks, often involving quite prosperous people but rarely gentry or clergy, who kept in touch over wide areas, treasuring their manuscripts of vernacular Bibles and increasingly tattered copies of Wyclifite tracts right down to the sixteenth-century Reformation. Significantly they did not produce much fresh literature after the first decades of the fifteenth century, apparently living off past achievements. Their rebellion against the Church was very qualified, for many of them remained involved in its life alongside their clandestine religious activities, rather as early Methodists were half inside, half outside the official English Church in the eighteenth century. It is understandable that Lollards did not gain access to the first English printing presses, which were to prove so important to Protestantism, but it is less easy to understand why they do not seem to have exploited those other great populist weapons of the sixteenth-century Reformation, hymns and songs; their meetings seem to have been dominated by readings from their literature and by sermons. This suggests that their dissent was as much intended to complement public religion as to challenge it, but that did not stop flurries of ecclesiastical investigations and burnings at the stake at intervals into the 1520s.
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Linked with this English movement of dissent was that of the Hussites, whose development in the kingdom of Bohemia in central Europe was very different. The unanticipated connection between England and far-away Prague, two parts of Europe with no natural links, arose through the marriage in 1382 of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV's daughter Anne of Bohemia to the English King Richard II. The Emperor Charles, also King of Bohemia, had made Prague his capital, lavishing money on it to create one of the most spectacular ensembles of public buildings in central Europe, providing Prague not merely with the beginnings of a great cathedral but with a new university. Such a lively city, owing its beauty to Charles's determination to make his capital a new Jerusalem for the Last Days of the world, was a natural breeding ground for urgent advocacy of Church reform even before the dean of the university's Philosophical Faculty, the priest Jan Hus, became fired by Wyclif's reforming message. Hus preached a series of increasingly outspoken sermons in Prague, and his attacks on the Church were like Wyclif's, easy to link to contemporary politics: the Czech nobility had come to resent what they saw as the Church authorities' interference in their affairs. Hus's movement became an assertion of Czech identity against German-speakers in the Bohemian Church and commonwealth, and unlike Lollardy it remained supported in all sections of society, from the university to the village.

In 1412, by now rector of the university, Hus was excommunicated by one of the three claimants to the papacy and appealed to a coming general council. Amid this gathering crisis Hus and his followers made a particularly provocative gesture: in 1414 they began offering consecrated wine as well as bread to the laity in their Eucharists, for the first time in centuries. This restoration of the elements 'in both kinds' became central to the movement which now developed in Bohemia; the eucharistic chalice containing the wine was to become a cherished symbol of the 'Hussite' movement, which against the general practice of the time, although in harmony with a demand of Jean Gerson and certain other theologians, came to insist on frequent communion for the laity, even for infants. The Hussites' eucharistic devotion offered a great contrast both to Wyclif's outlook and to the text-based gatherings of the later Lollards, although the original links between the movements meant that a significant number of English Wyclifite manuscripts have survived into the modern Czech Republic. Yet soon Hus himself was dead, betrayed at the Council of Konstanz in 1415 when the assembled clerics prevailed on the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund to set aside an imperial promise of safe conduct to the Prague Reformer. After being imprisoned in vile conditions, Hus was burned at the stake. It was a powerful symbol that the institutional Church was no longer capable of dealing constructively with a movement of reform.

Hus's death turned him into a Czech martyr: an explosion of fury in Prague established what was in effect a separate royal Bohemian Church, at first supported by the nobility. Pressure from both emperor and pope resulted in the abandonment of much of this experiment, which caused further anger in the city. Once more the Eucharist became a symbol of the revolution: a mob was led by the insurrectionary preacher Jan Zelivsky bearing the eucharistic monstrance from his parish church to the city hall, where the crowd hurled thirteen Catholic loyalists from an upper window to their deaths, the first 'Defenestration' of Prague.
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The following insurrection featured violent destruction of symbols of traditional religion: the first large-scale wrecking of monasteries and church art by Christians in the history of Christian Europe, as thoroughgoing as anything the continent was to see from the 1520s to the 1560s. The period between the first and the second (rather less bloodthirsty) Prague Defenestration a year short of two centuries later (see p. 646) was one of continuous if intermittent religious warfare focused on Bohemia, all springing out of the martyrdom of Hus, although merging with the wider conflict of the Reformation. For four centuries and more, Prague's half-finished Cathedral of St Vitus, whose rebuilding the Emperor Charles IV had begun in the decades before the Hussite crisis erupted, was a permanent memorial to that troubled time. Its lavish eastern wing was the equal of any earlier French cathedral, but it petered out in the huge empty void windows of its half-built transepts, a bathetically unfinished spire, and an incoherent muddle where the nave should be (see Plate 11).

But after decades of vicious civil war and the defeat of successive outside attempts to destroy the revolution, an independent Hussite Church structure still survived, grudgingly and incompletely recognized by Rome. After all the destruction of the previous decades, it was a surprisingly traditionalist body, still cherishing images, processions and a cult of Mary, but it was proud of two points of difference from the pope's Church: its use in worship of Czech, the language of the people, rather than Latin, and its continuing insistence on reception in both kinds or species (
sub utraque specie
). So important was the latter to the mainstream Hussite Bohemian Church that it took the name 'Utraquist'. From 1471 the Utraquist Church had no archbishop of its own, and in a curious compromise with the rest of the Catholic world, it sent prospective priests off to Venice for ordination by bishops in that independent-minded republic. In default of a native episcopate, effective power in the Church was firmly in the hands of noblemen and the leaders of the major towns and cities. It was an extreme example of a transfer which was quietly happening in large areas of Europe, and which became a major feature of the official 'magisterial' Reformations in the following century: a slow decentralization of the Church from below, inexorably working against the late medieval papacy's attempts to reassert its authority.
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Formally separate after 1457 from the Utraquists were remnants of the more radical Hussites, the Union of Bohemian Brethren (
Unitas
Fratrum
). What survived of their religious radicalism had major social implications, for, inspired by the south Bohemian writer Petr Chelcicky and in the name of New Testament Christianity, they condemned all types of violence, including political repression, capital punishment, service in war or the swearing of oaths to earthly authorities. They rejected the idea of a separate priesthood, as well as the belief (still so dear to the Utraquists) that the Eucharist was a miracle in which bread and wine became the body and blood of Jesus. All these doctrines were to re-emerge in the sixteenth-century Reformation. After yet further upheaval in Bohemia in 1547, much of the group took refuge in the province of Moravia, and they came to be known as the Moravian Brethren. It was a curious turn of history that successors of these Moravians, whose first hero Hus had taken inspiration from the writings of one great English Christian, eventually after three centuries had a major influence on another Englishman who sparked great religious change: John Wesley (see pp. 749-50).

So, between the Utraquist Church and the
Unitas Fratrum
, Bohemia became the first part of Latin Europe to slip out of its medieval papal obedience. Only a few German-speaking areas and a few royal free cities within the Bohemian kingdom retained their papal loyalty through the fifteenth century. These lonely outposts of obedience to Rome in Bohemia are worth noting, because they represented the only part of medieval Europe to which the description 'Roman Catholic' can be applied with any meaning. It may at first sight seem surprising that this term familiar in the anglophone world makes no sense before the Reformation, but it is clearly redundant when applied to an age when everyone outside Bohemia consciously or unconsciously formed part of the same Catholic Church structure, tied in so many complex ways to the heart and head of the whole organization in Rome. Soon that was to change. By 1500, the failings of successive popes in their pretensions to be leaders of the universal Church compromised their defeat of the conciliarists in the fifteenth century, and did nothing to end continuing criticism of papal primacy. That made the papal machine all the more sensitive to any new challenge to its authority, or to any attempt to resurrect language and ideas which had been used against it before, as Luther discovered in the years after 1517. Even before Luther, challenges were being posed by some of the best minds in Europe.

OLD WORLDS BRING NEW: HUMANISM (1300-1500)

From the fourteenth century, there developed in Italy a new way of looking at the world which has come to be called humanism. Humanism can seem a difficult phenomenon to pin down and define, not least because no one used the word at the time. Early-nineteenth-century historians newly coined it from words actually in use in the late fifteenth century, when it became common to talk about the liberal/non-theological arts subjects in a university curriculum as '
humanae litterae
' (literature human rather than divine in focus), while a scholar with a particular enthusiasm for these subjects was called a '
humanista
'.
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A further complication is that 'humanist' has come to be used in modern times for someone who rejects the claims of revealed religion. This was not a feature of the movement we are considering. The vast majority of humanists were patently sincere Christians who wished to apply their enthusiasm to the exploration and proclamation of their faith. They were trying to restore a Christian perfection to humanity.