THE FATE OF individual palmesels during the Protestant Reformation depended as much on local politics as on general location. The distance from Schwäbisch Hall to Biberach, passing through Schwäbisch Gmünd, is less than a hundred miles. The region has been predominantly Lutheran since the Reformation. Schwäbisch Hall's palmesel survived the city's transition to Lutheranism intact, but no longer took part in a procession. Biberach's palmesel was burned in 1531 during a local spate of Zwinglian iconoclasm. Schwabish Gmund's palmesel not only survived the Reformation under the protection of a doggedly Roman Catholic city council, but also continued active until the mid-nineteenth century. In this chapter, I look more closely at the vagaries of iconoclasm and reform. I begin not in sixteenth-century Germany, but in late fourteenth-century Prague, then the capital of Bohemia, on the eve of the Hussite Revolution.

Prague's best-known palmesel belonged to the cathedral of Saint Vitus, located within the castle complex that still overlooks the city. The cathedral's Palm Sunday procession began outside the castle, probably at Strahov Monastery, where palms and other branches were blessed and distributed. First mentioned in the records in the midthirteenth century, the palmesel joined the procession at the high point of the monastery complex. There, choirboys “threw themselves” (rather than merely their garments) in front of the image, and hymns and antiphons were sung. The processional route from Strahov sloped gently downwards, entered the castle through the western gate beside the White Tower, and finally arrived at the cathedral. Choirboys pulled “the donkey with the image of the Saviour” (asell[um] cu[m] ymagine Salvatoris) into the church as far as the entrance to the choir, where it remained during mass.

In 1421, the cathedral's palmesel earned the dubious distinction of being the first processional image of Christ on a donkey known to have been destroyed by iconoclasts. Six years earlier, despite a guarantee of safe passage, the Bohemian reformer Jan Hus had been condemned by the Council of Constance, handed over to the secular authorities, and burned as a heretic. The people of Bohemia responded by intensifying their insistence on independence from Rome in matters of religion and from the German king in matters of linguistic, cultural, and political identity.