Paradise on the Nezárka_ The Adamites, Jan Zizka, and the Limits of the Hussite Revolution - Paperback
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Paradise on the Nezárka: The Adamites, Jan Zizka, and the Limits of the Hussite Revolution
In the summer of 1421, a community of naked Christians declared a river island in southern Bohemia to be the restored Garden of Eden. They called each other Adam and Eve. They burned the nearest town. And then Jan Zizka, the blind general who had already repelled four papal crusades, arrived with four hundred soldiers to end the experiment.
The Bohemian Adamites lasted six months. Their questions have never gone away.
Paradise on the Nezárka is a narrative history of the Hussite Revolution, the most successful heretical uprising in medieval European history, told through the story of its most extreme expression. Beginning with the burning of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415 and ending on the battlefield at Lipany in 1434, it follows the full arc of a revolution that shook Christendom, repelled five crusades, reached the Baltic Sea, and finally destroyed itself. At its centre is the island commune of the Nezárka: the community that took the revolution's founding premises further than anyone else, with consequences that were simultaneously illuminating and catastrophic.
Written with the urgency of the best literary history, Paradise on the Nezárka asks what happens when ordinary people take theology seriously enough to die for it, and what happens when they take it seriously enough to kill.
Macus Ó Murchadha grew up in County Clare on the west coast of Ireland, where the landscape's long memory for contested history gave him an early fascination with the ways communities remember and misremember their own pasts. He has spent two decades reading in the history of medieval and early modern religion, with a particular interest in the movements at the edges of orthodoxy - the communities that took the premises of official Christianity further than the institution could follow. Paradise on the Nezárka is his most ambitious work, the product of years of engagement with the primary sources and modern scholarship of the Bohemian Reformation. He writes to make the past available to the present: not simplified, not sanitized, but alive in all its difficulty and all its human complexity.
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