The Religious Reformations of the Sixteenth Century 259an English translation of the Bible and organized a
march on London in 1413. Fearing that the egalitarian
tendencies of the Lollards encouraged social disorder,
Henry V suppressed the movement, but scattered com-
munities preserved their traditions until the outbreak of
the Protestant Reformation.
Because England and Bohemia were diplomatically
aligned on the Great Schism, a number of Czech stu-
dents left the University of Paris for Oxford after 1378.
There they came in contact with the teachings of
Wycliffe, and by 1400 his works were being openly
debated at Prague. Wycliffe’s ideas were popular be-
cause they seemed to coincide with an already well-
developed reform movement. Czech preachers had
long attacked the morality of the clergy and were now
demanding a Czech translation of the Bible. Great re-
sentment also existed over denying the communion to
the laity in both kinds. Reserving both bread and wine
for the priest while giving only bread to the laity was
common throughout Europe. In Bohemia the practice
was seen as an expression of clerical arrogance.
Though basically religious, these issues were hope-
lessly intertwined with the ethnic rivalry between
Czechs and Germans that had troubled Bohemia for
centuries. The Kingdom of Bohemia had a large popu-
lation of Germans who were often resented by their
Slavic neighbors. Moreover, the church held nearly 40
percent of the land, and many of the leading church-
men were German. To many, anticlericalism was there-
fore an expression of Czech national feeling as well as
of frustrated piety, and this association quickly drew the
reform movement into the arena of imperial politics.
The University of Prague found itself at the center
of these controversies. In 1409 King Vaclav expelled
the German students and faculty and appointed Jan
Hus, a Czech professor, as rector. Hus had been at-
tracted to Wycliffe’s writings by their anticlericalism,
but he also saw their extreme philosophical realism as a
weapon against the German theologians, most of
whom were nominalists. He did not, however, reject
transubstantiation and was in general more conservative
than Wycliffe on every issue save that of papal author-
ity. Hus did not think of himself as a heretic, and in
1415 he accepted an invitation to defend his views be-
fore the Council of Constance. The invitation had been
orchestrated by Sigismund who offered him a safe-con-
duct, but the promised guarantee was little more than a
passport, and Hus was burned at the stake on July 6.
The burning of Hus provoked a national outcry in
Bohemia. Taking the communion chalice as their sym-
bol, the Czechs broke with Rome and developed a
liturgy in the Czech language. When their protector,
Vaclav, died in 1419, he was succeeded by Sigismund.
The Hussites, as they were now called, rose in armed
revolt and resoundingly defeated the papal-imperial
crusades against them in 1420, 1422, and 1431. Finally,
in 1436 the Hussites secured a treaty that guaranteed
them control over the Bohemian church and confirmed
their earlier expropriation of church property.The Religious Impact of Nominalism,
Humanism, and the Printing Press
The religious tensions and controversies of the later
Middle Ages were heightened by intellectual move-
ments that threatened the church’s authority in more
subtle ways. Nominalism (see chapter 9), which grew in
popularity during the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-
turies, tended to undermine the foundations of dogma
by denying that they were susceptible to rational proof.
Though never the dominant school in late medieval
thought, it influenced many theologians including Mar-
tin Luther.
Humanism exerted an even stronger influence on
religious issues. Humanists such as Erasmus criticized
the moral shortcomings of the clergy and used their
mastery of rhetoric to attack the scholastic philoso-
phers. Their belief in the superiority of ancient over
modern texts contributed to the idea that scripture
alone was the ultimate source of religious truth.
Though many humanists, including Erasmus, remained
within the old church, this concept of sola scriptura
would be central to the teachings of the reformers.
Many of them, including Zwingli, Calvin, and
Melanchthon had been trained as humanists. They used
humanist methodology in their analysis of sacred texts.
Humanist respect for antiquity may also have influ-
enced the growing belief that the practices of the early
church most closely approximated the intentions of
Christ and that subsequent developments, including
the rise of the papacy, were modern corruptions.
The reform movements that destroyed the unity of
western Christendom in the sixteenth century may
therefore be seen as the products of a generalized dis-
satisfaction with the church. The development of print-
ing, which made the writings of the reformers available
to thousands of people, and the conjunction of reli-
gious reform with the political needs of certain states
and cities transformed that dissatisfaction into what is
usually called the Protestant Reformation.