Matthew of Janow is a Characters codex entry in Kingdom Come: Deliverance.
Codex entry[]
Cca. 1350/1355 - 30. 11. 1393
Matthew of Janow was an intellectual, writer, preacher and theologian. He was born in Janow, a village in South Bohemia. He began his studies in Prague and completed them at the university in Paris, where he became a master of Liberal Arts. He never completed the study of theology he had begun. Following his return to Prague, he held a number of Church offices and became the confessor of Archbishop Jan of Jenstein.
His intellectual works, concerned mostly with the study of the Bible, emphasising the Christ and the Eucharist, while on the other hand he criticised some subsequent, non-biblical stipulations of the Church, which he regarded as lacking the authority of Scripture and sometimes contradictiong it. He also criticised the Papal Schism of the time, the disunity of the Church and the exessive cult of sacred image of saints.
For some of his ideas and teachings he was suspected of heresy, but he cleared himself of such accusations before the Archbishop's Vicar and revised some of his opinions.
Matthew is regarded as one of the most significan Czech reformers before Jan Hus, together with the preacher Konrad von Waldhausen and Jan Milíč of Kroměříž, who greatly influenced him.
The entire progress of the early Czech reformation was driven by criticism of the Church's material conditions, appeals to personal devotion and frequent Communion. Matthew's work was followed by that of the important Hussite theologian Jakoubek of Stříbro, who defended the taking of the Eucharist "by both means" (bread and wine) even for lay people.
