What’s in a Name, or What’s at Stake When We Talk about ‘Hussites’?

Abstract

AbstractRecent scholarship on the Waldensian and Cathar heresies has expressed considerable reservations about how scholars use names and labels to describe and categorize their subjects. The extensive debate on the appropriate use of terms for these movements has not, however, significantly or explicitly affected contemporary scholarship on the fifteenth‐century Hussite movement and Utraquist Church, which both developed in Bohemia. After analyzing how scholars have used the traditional historiographic tropes of nationalism, revolution, and reformation to understand Hussite history, this article employs the insights of contemporary heresy scholars in order to determine how scholars can responsibly – or at least knowingly – use a conventional term like ‘Hussite’ to describe the process of religious reform in Bohemia without unduly limiting the scope of scholarly inquiry or tacitly ignoring the importance of the Utraquist period. Ultimately, it seems preferable to frame an analysis of heresy and reform in the Czech lands primarily as an independent Bohemian Reformation that lasted from the mid‐fourteenth until the early seventeenth century, in which both the Hussite Revolution and Utraquist Church played foundational ideological and institutional roles.