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At the time of the Hundred Years’ War and the Hussite Revolution, France was divided into three power zones, the territory controlled by the King of the Valois family, the Duchy of Burgundy and the western part occupied by England. All three parties took hostile positions in relation to the representatives of the reform movement led by Jan Hus, the subsequent revolutionary upheavals and the policy of the Utraquist King George of Poděbrady. Olivier Marin cleverly divided his work into three parts. The first is mainly of a diplomatic-political nature, because it analyses the attitudes of the French court and the high clergy to the tumultuous events in Bohemia from the end of the first decade of the 15th century until the conclusion of the Council of Basel. The second part focuses on doctrinal contradictions, their sources, the method of argumentation and the main controversial issues. It is only in the final third section that the reception of the Hussites in France comes into play, both in terms of available information and isolated expressions of sympathy. In an effort to enliven the debate without intending to find a definitive solution, Olivier Marin considers it useful to reconsider the three following trends in current historiography.
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First of all, according to him, the Hussites are considered to be the beginning of the Reformation cycle, when its counterweight in the form of the Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation was the sheer number of anti-Hussite treatises, some of which are presented in the appendices in many manuscript copies, not sufficient evidence of premature counter-reformation? Second, in his opinion, the concept that the Church systematically and consciously overestimated the dangers of heresies is even less sustainable. Just as the church underestimated the Waldensian ecumenism, so it later closed its eyes to the military superiority of the Hussite troops and preferred “ostrich” politics (sticking one’s head in the sand) to the dangers of the Hussite schism. Third, Olivier Marin does not agree with the methodology for qualification of medieval heresies that can be found in contemporary French medieval studies. Using the example of Hussite Calixtinism, he then refuses, put simply, to equate heresy with anti-clericalism. Instead of anti-clericalism, it would be appropriate to speak of “anti-sacerdotalism”, i.e. the rejection of the necessary mediation of the priest between God and ordinary believers. Without reservations, it is possible to place this monograph by Olivier Marin among the most valuable works of foreign authors dealing with Hussitism, not only for its exemplary processing of the material, but also by conceptual overlaps with the deeper social and ideological streams of the 14th to 16th centuries. Moreover, thanks to this revealing and stylistically attractive book, it has again become clear that Hussitism was not just a matter of the Czech lands or the neighbouring lands.