Jan Hus

Hus was a Prague priest and university master whose preaching, in Czech rather than Latin, made the Bethlehem Chapel the centre of a reform movement in early fifteenth-century Bohemia. He drew heavily on Wycliffe, whose writings had travelled to Prague, but his concerns were more pastoral than speculative. He attacked the moral failures of the clergy and the sale of indulgences. In his De Ecclesia (1413) he argued that the true Church is the company of the predestined rather than the institution that governs it. Excommunicated, then summoned to the Council of Constance under an imperial safe-conduct, he was imprisoned, refused to abjure errors he denied ever having held, and was burned on 6 July 1415. His death set Bohemia alight: the Hussite movement that followed outlasted the crusades sent against it, and a century later Luther recognised in Hus a forerunner. He is labelled here as Roman Catholic, the tradition in which he was ordained, served and died, though his work sits in open tension with its institutional claims and belongs equally to the prehistory of the Reformation.