The Národní obrození, i.e., revival of Czech national as well as political identity of the late eighteenth and especially nineteenth century in the Czech-speaking lands, included vigorous medievalism. The “father of Czech History,” František Palacký (1798–1876), designated Jan Hus as the father of Czech letters. Not only had Hus's preaching and writings sparked the move- ment that ultimately compelled the Holy Roman Empire and the Roman Catholic Church to permit worship and preaching in the Czech language, but he was argued to have been the first to introduce diacritical marks (so-called nabodeníčka) into the Latin alphabet to capture the subtleties of the language. From the time of Palacký through the Soviet period, the Hussites would figure in descriptions of the “Czech national identity.” Tomáš G. Masaryk (1850–1937), the moving force behind the formation of Czechoslovakia in 1918, and the country's first president, was an enthusiastic practitioner of this “Hussite medievalism,” as were his later, communist opponents, who would institute their own version of the practice. The story of the modern use of the Hussites in identifying what it is to be Czech is well known to Czech readers, and is becoming more familiar to Anglophone readers. I would like to recount an element of Masaryk's medievalism that is less familiar: his frequent admiring references to Petr Chelčický (1390–1460), an innovative figure from the Czech vernacular theological tradition not widely known beyond Czech scholarly circles. The change in Czech identity, from a liberal European nation to a Soviet satellite state, led to a similar reassessment of Chelčický's place in Czech history, which was followed by post-Cold War efforts to separate the thinker from these nationalist arguments.

Unlike other significant political figures in the early twentieth century, Tomáš G. Masaryk was a scholar, having received a doctorate in philosophy at the University of Vienna in 1876, studying under the German philosopher and psychologist Franz Brentano (1838–1917), and publishing a Habilitation thesis on Suicide and the Meaning of Civilization in 1881. The study of philos- ophy at that period frequently involved developing all-encompassing broad explanations grounded in complex theory, an approach in which Masaryk had little interest. Instead, he embraced a positivistic approach to explaining society, making him among the pioneers of modern sociology. As he devel- oped his understanding of Czech nationalism, he traced the uses of the term “suicide” back to the Protestant Reformation.