'After Me There Will Come Braver Men': Jan Hus and Reformation Polemics in the 1530s

Abstract

This article analyses two early plays from the era of the German Reformation, the Tragedia Johannis Huss (1537), by Johannes Agricola, and Ein heimliche Gesprach von der Tragedia Johannis Hussen (1538), by Johannes Cochlaeus. Agricola's play dramatized the trial and execution of Jan Hus, the Bohemian priest and reformer who was executed by the Council of Constance in 1415. A number of accounts of Hus's trial were published in the 1530s as part of the Lutheran campaign against the convocation of a general church council; this paper argues that Agricola's turn to drama represented a broadening of the Lutherans' use of printed and oral media in publicizing their attack on the council. Cochlaeus's play was a direct response to Agricola's, but utilized different means to undercut the potential impact of Agricola's Tragedia. Cochlaeus satirized his Lutheran opponents and their wives, thus using the comic potential of the stage to expand his own polemical arsenal against Luther and his followers. Through these two plays, this paper examines both the development of Lutheran historical arguments against church councils and the dynamics of the propagandistic interchanges between Roman and Lutheran authors in the second decade of the Reformation. It ultimately argues that these two authors' use of dramatic media exemplified efforts by both churches to reach audiences in new and potentially more effective ways in order to reify their differences and galvanize their followers.