A Brill Calendar: July 6

Few trials before a Bench of Judges ended as dramatically as the one July on 6, 1415 in the cathedral of the Imperial Free City of Constance.

The accused, Jan Hus (43) – scholar, priest and preacher seeking to reform religion since the beginning of the 15th century – was asked to recant from ‘heresies’ (thirty of them, none stating his tenets correctly); and refused to do so.

Hus was deposed, ‘stante pede’, from priesthood; his soul consigned to the Devil, the body to a stake outside the city, where the 16th ecumenical council of the Roman Catholic Church had opened the year before, in an attempt to restore unity in Christendom. Since 1409, the flock of Christ had found itself suffering from a surfeit of Popes: (three ‘Holy Fathers’ to be precise); the ‘Western Schism’ as such originating in 1378, when Jan Hus was still an infant.

After the well-beloved popular preacher (who gave his sermons in Czech rather than Latin) had been burned to death, praying at full voice until the flames took their toll, the Council would drag on for almost three more years, until unity was restored in the person of Oddone Colonna, elected as Pope Martin V: ‘Papa Martini’.

It is seldom that the shrewd Chinese curse ‘May You Live in Interesting Times’ has been more appropriate than in the case of Jan Hus. One generation earlier, the Englishman John Wycliffe, another scholar, had already threatened church-political unity. Wycliffe was also a source of inspiration to those not opposed to a Reform of Catholic doctrine and practice. Both reformers were champions of using their mother-tongue in matters of religion: like Martin Luther, more than a century after the feverish prayers of Jan Hus.