Michael D. Barbezat's Burning Bodies: Communities, Eschatology, and the Punishment of Heresy in the Middle Ages makes a significant foray into the study of medieval heresy and heretics. Barbezat's subject is an especially difficult one as the focus of his work is medieval theologians’ justifications of the execution of purported heretics via burning them alive. Fire and its attendant imagery permeate the “orthodox polemic” written by these authors, the source material for this work, which chronologically stretches from the eleventh century (with the first recorded burning of heretics in Orléans in 1022) to the thirteenth century (the time of the Albigensian Crusade which saw the execution of hundreds of heretics). In the writings of theological authorities including Ambrose, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, and Hugh of St. Victor, among others, fire was both omnipresent and oppositional. Per the patristic author Jerome, fire could illuminate and/or incinerate. For subsequent theological authorities who viewed fire as an illuminating force, the Christian community—a community from which it was believed heretics were excluded on account of their obstinance in their adherence to their heresy—was aflame with God's love. Nevertheless, in this reasoning, the existence of heresy and heretics was necessary to reinforce the rectitude of the principles of the community of orthodox believers.

Barbezat's study stakes a midway position between scholars who have taken a more “traditionalist” approach to the study of medieval heresy (which states the campaigns against heretics indicated heresies were, since the twelfth century, a historical and existential danger for medieval Christendom) and other scholars, such as R. I. Moore, Mark Gregory Pegg, and Uwe Brunn, who argue any conception of an organized and systematic Christian heresy existed solely in the minds of medieval theological authorities. Over the course of an introduction, seven chapters, and a conclusion—each of which exhibits meticulous research and organization—Barbezat shows how medieval theologians’ orthodox polemic took those whom they condemned and “turned [them] into instruments of the discourse that justified their murder” (3). They conceptualized heretics as weeds creeping among the wheat of the Christian faithful or a spreading cancer in the corporate body of Christ. In both versions, heretics are pernicious invaders, literally to be burned away for the general maintenance of the health of the Christian community.

Barbezat's book is excellent overall. Still, I must raise some criticisms. Although he is scrupulous in his research and his investigation of the original language of the sources themselves is technically precise, his analysis of medieval theologians’ “orthodox polemic” borders being too objective at times. I must stress that Barbezat is no apologist for these theologians’ horrific positions. But he does not critique their positions enough. When he discusses Pope Innocent III's 1199 decision to connect heresy with the crime of lèse-majesté—laying the foundation for secular rulers later to apply the death penalty—Barbezat notes authorities could seize the goods and properties of such heretics (56). This, of course, could enrich them greatly, providing yet another incentive to crack down on heresy, which Barbezat neglects to mention. Or, when he offers the example of Lady Geralda who was killed during the viciousness of the Albigensian Crusade—crucesignati seized her, threw her into a pit, and proceeded to drop stones upon her—he suggests that medieval authors of orthodox polemic urged that their then-contemporary readers “should not find a moral failing in the crusading venture. . . . [The burning of heretics] is a testament of ongoing righteousness” (166). We modern readers, however, should most certainly find fault in these crusaders’ deeds. Barbezat attempts to address this criticism in the last few lines of his monograph, wherein he writes: “In the recovery of the logic and imagery behind persecution there is a danger of perpetuating or even completing the erasure of the actual victims of persecution that persecutors attempted to perform in the past.” But even that is far too sedate, especially when in the same passage he argues that these lives represent “the presence of various specters . . . [whose] erasure . . . is never quite complete” (174). In my opinion he could—and should—have offered a much stronger critique of these theologians’ “orthodox polemic.” Medieval clerical and secular authorities snuffed out the lives of suspected heretics by flame, stone, or sword. Despite accounts like Caesarius of Heisterbach's 1163 relation of the heretical maiden of Cologne that suggest that heretics consigned themselves willingly to the flames rather than disavow their beliefs, nevertheless they still suffered.

Despite my criticisms, Barbezat has nonetheless provided both the medieval and religious studies communities an invaluable resource with his superb monograph. Indeed, his book is most important and should be required reading for many medievalists. The rhetorical strategies and language used by some medieval religious and secular authorities to justify the marginalization, domination, and oppression of those whom they perceived as occupying the fringe of society are in the same vein, if not the same style, that some of those authorities today use to demonize those whom they deem as “other.” With his scholarship, Barbezat also corrects modern errors and misconceptions regarding the Middle Ages. As he states, for many today, the very mention of the Middle Ages immediately evokes the popular visions of mass burnings at the stake (10). Barbezat offers a far more lucid and nuanced understanding of this grim aspect of the medieval experience. Although not as widespread—as Barbezat notes, there were very few instances in which individuals died by being burned alive (hangings and beheadings were far more common methods of execution)—this form of execution was nevertheless part of the development of this “persecuting society,” in the words of Moore. For the authors whom Barbezat investigates, the flames of the pyre to which the heretics were consigned mirrored both the flames of Christian caritas (tempering the iron bonds of the community of the faithful in God's fiery love) as well as the material fires of Hell (which they believed unrepentant heretics would face forever). For those burned at the stake, however, stripped of their personal possessions, their social positions, and ultimately their very lives, those fires represented not love but hatred, not salvation but devastation.