THE HUSSITE MOVEMENT IN THE CZECH REPUBLIC: CURRENT RESEARCH TRENDS

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to review the main areas of research on the Hussite movement in Bohemia in the last decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century. The crisis that engulfed all of Europe in the 1460s became particularly acute in Bohemia at the end of the century, and in the 15th century it grew into the Hussite movement, named after one of its leaders, Jan Hus. The Hussite movement was a multifaceted social phenomenon that lasted for more than eight decades of Czech history. It was a struggle for church reform, an attempt to change the socio-political system, and a nationalist movement against German domination in the country.The Hussite movement has a rich historiography. The epresentatives of the positivist school (V.V. Tomek, J. Sedlak, J. Hall and his students) made a significant contribution to the study of Hussitism. In the so-called socialist period of Czechoslovakia’s development, “Marxist” historiography came to dominate. The focus was mainly on the socio- economic history of Bohemia in the pre-Hussite and Hussite periods, the radical wing of the Hussite camp, especially the Taborites, as the communists considered themselves the heirs to the revolutionary legacy of the Taborites. The departure from the Marxist paradigm in the study of medieval Czech history began in the 1960s and 1970s and intensified in the late 1970s and early 1980s, when a new generation of researchers emerged. However, the turn of the 1980s and 1990s marked a real breakthrough in the development of historical science in the Czech Republic. A new generation of researchers today continues and develops the work begun by their predecessors in the study of the Hussite movement (F. Šmаgel, P. Čornej, M. Polivka, J. Boubin, J. Čechura, J. Jurоk, and others).One can observe the evolution of the concept of the Hussite movement in terms of expanding its chronology and social base, the processes of reforming its own church, identifying integrative influences on the development of the Czech Republic and European countries, with a prevailing tendency to compare these revolutionary transformations to similar changes that accompanied the Reformation, its interconnection with similar European development processes. The current direction of research into the Hussite movement is characterised by the removal of ideological layers, when Hussitism was viewed exclusively as a grassroots movement, to an understanding of Hussitism as a complex of socio-economic, political, religious and national factors. The characterisation of Hussitism as a multifaceted phenomenon made it possible to extend the upper limits of the movement to 1485.