Phillip N. Haberkern. Patron Saint and Prophet

The year 2015 was of special significance for the study of the Czech national hero Jan Hus. It was one hundred years earlier, on the five-hundredth anniversary of Hus’s execution by fire in July 1415, that Thomas Masaryk launched in Switzerland the Czech independence movement that led to the disintegration of the Habsburg Empire at the end of World War I. The six-hundredth anniversary stimulated the appearance of significant new literature on Hus in Czech and German. The jubilee also found response in the United States in a distinguished trilogy by the doyen of Hus studies, Thomas A. Fudge, published in 2013–2015. Fudge was joined by his junior American colleague Phillip N. Haberkern in 2016 in marking the occasion with the publication of Patron Saint and Prophet: Jan Hus in the Bohemian and German Reformations. The introduction offers a brief, competent biography of Hus, stressing the paramount significance of his martyr’s death on the development of the Bohemian and German Reformations. In agreement with Fudge and Jiří Kejř, Haberkern recognizes the legalistic validity of Hus’s trial in Constance. On the other hand, Haberkern differs from Paul de Vooght by attributing to Hus a strictly predestinarian ecclesiology in accord with John Wyclif’s (11)

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Art history · Biography · Czech · German · HERO · Literature · Martyr · Patron saint · SAINT · Trilogy · Classics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity