Patron Saint and Prophet: Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformations by Phillip N. Haberkern (review)

A Reformation legend recounts a dream wherein a Saxon prince saw a German monk writing words on a church door with a quill that stretched from Wittenberg to Rome. The monk claimed that the quill came from a 100-year-old Czech goose. Visual depictions featured the quill dislodging the papal tiara while remaining impervious to all efforts to break it. While the ancient goose perished in a bonfire, the dream of Elector Frederick the Wise was about Luther and Jan Hus (after the stake). Though the text of the dream and its visual depictions reflect the thesis of Phillip Haberkern's book, this tale is curiously omitted from his study.

The title notwithstanding, this is not a book about Jan Hus. That said, it is a study devoted to the posthumous memories of Hus. The book might be characterized instead as a volume devoted to dreaming about Hus. The Hus of history is less important than the Hus of faith and portraits imagined by Luther and others.

It is especially challenging to review a book on a topic on which one has already written five monographs. The natural tendency to compare must be suppressed. Phillip Haberkern cannot be compared with Matthew Spinka or any of the others who have essayed judgments on Hus. This is important because the book represents a new approach and the argument is generally reliable. Unlike Spinka, Haberkern has shifted attention away from Hus to the uses, misuses, and abuses of the martyred priest. This is very much the case in the second half of the book where Hus virtually vanishes. This is not a critique, for this is precisely what Haberkern wants to do. Hence, the figure of Hus, in Haberkern's hands, is an important recognition of the invented Hus on the sacred landscape of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Europe among communities of Hussites, Utraquists, Lutherans, Protestants, and Catholics. Thus, it is not Hus himself which matters as much as the multiple images produced by this mixed multitude.

What Haberkern succeeds in doing is underscoring the politicizing of history and theology which occurred in breathtaking leaps and bounds across the multiple religious worlds of Europe at the frontier between medieval and modern eras. That politicizing reveals an interest in controlling history rather than participating in it. The treatment of Jakoubek Stříbro (important for Anglophone scholarship) and a sustained analysis of sixteenth-century sources are both new and welcome. What is particularly good about the study is that the narrative and arguments are straightforward and Haberkern avoids confessional prejudice. The bibliography is useful, and while the pictures are not new they are beneficial. Haberkern exhibits a sound grasp of manuscripts and international scholarship, pertinent to the several topics, and his transition of page to stage, or written text to dramaturgical performance, develops a new methodology in Hus studies. The crux of the book remains an elaboration of inventing the past to support the present in hopes of creating the future. Both Luther and Cochlaeus gave Hus a wax nose.

The index is grossly inadequate, and there are far too many copy-editing issues. There are more than fifty errors of one sort or another ranging from inconsistent referencing, spelling, wrong dates, to say nothing of some relevant sources overlooked. Most of this is not serious but it does detract. Nevertheless, as a first book, Haberkern has successfully turned a Ph.D. dissertation into a monograph which advances our understanding of the memoria. of Jan Hus and the role he was forced to play in the drama of religious conflict in the time of Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and nascent modernity.