Iohannes Hus, , ed. Helena Krmíčková, Dušan Coufal, Jana Fuksová, Lucie Mazalová, Petra Mutlová, Jana Nechutová, and Libor Švanda. Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis, 274. Turnhout: Brepols, 2016, xcii, 350 pp., 15. color ill.

Before his immolation, the Bohemian theologian Jan Hus spent the final 242 days of his life as a prisoner in the lakeside imperial city of Constance. That was 1415. More recently, and partially in anticipation of the sixth centenary of his execution at the Council of Constance, the past decade has seen a marked increase in attention, popular and scholarly alike, paid to all things Hus and Hussite. Jan Hus, one could say, is ‘hot.’ This relative uptick in Hus’s visibility is not, however, simply commemorative; it has as much to do with trends in the study of the later Middle Ages as it does with public history. Much like his contemporary Jean Gerson, Hus left behind an extraordinary written corpus that exemplifies the world in which he lived, and scholars have made a concerted effort to resituate Hus within the complexities of European society during the Great Western Schism. Instead of repeating the narrative of Hus as the forerunner of a Reformation to come, some of the most compelling studies on the Hussite milieu have focused on an increasingly wide range of topics: the history of political thought, literary networks and communication, book history, vernacular preaching and literature, and even the notoriously under-studied wilderness of late-medieval canon law. And yet regardless of the path one takes to get to Hus, and wherever one thinks that path may take them, all roads lead to Constance in one way or another, to his trial, his death, and to its aftermath in the decades and centuries that followed.