To use a word well suited to Louisa A. Burnham's So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke, it is shocking that Beguins are not more prominent in the religious history of the European Middle Ages. Overshadowed by crusade-inspiring Cathars, and more evanescent than Waldenses, Beguins—Franciscan tertiaries, lay adherents of the order's Spiritual wing—have attracted scholarly interest in lamentable disproportion to the acute attention they received from inquisitors in southern France during a brief period in the fourteenth century. Yet to medievalists worrying the historical and analytical differences between “heresy” and “orthodoxy,” Beguins offer what Burnham characterizes with apt concision as their “fundamental problematic … radical and apocalyptic on the one hand, [and] a spirituality and practice only minimally divergent from the norm on the other” (139). Using chiefly inquisitorial records, the notarial registers of Montpellier, and a Beguin martyrology, Burnham seeks illuminatively to “evoke … the texture of their world, to personalize their struggle, and to make their choices, their sacrifices, and their resistance come to life” (4).

Burnham begins by recounting the conflict over evangelical poverty that rent the Franciscans into “Conventuals” and condemned “Spirituals,” and by introducing friar and theologian of poverty Peter John Olivi. Olivi, lauded by Beguins as a saint after his death in 1298, centered them and their apocalyptic vision, a perspective sharpened by the persecution that began in the 1310s. Chapter 2, following James Given, analyzes Beguins' “weak” forms of resistance to inquisitors (evasion, humor). Montpellier, the site of chapter 3, was a refuge for those evaders, and Beguins' wide support there is illustrated by Peire de Tornamira—priest, Beguin, and member of a prominent urban family—and by one Lady Gaucelina's mysterious property sale, theorized here as proving that patronage reached beyond known Beguins and even to local Conventuals. The final chapter studies two models of leadership within the Beguin community, practical and inspirational, respectively: Peire Trencavel, who escaped to Italy, and the fascinating visionary Prous Boneta, executed in 1328.

So Great a Light is powerfully distinguished by two related senses: the dramatic and the intimate. It is highly visual and even tense, replete with failed escapes, secret meetings, inquisitors in pursuit, an “underground railroad,” and vividly depicted scenery. Several references to films and novels heighten this tone and narrative feel; for example, inquisitorial torture is exemplified by an episode from Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose (56). Burnham is a skilful cartographer and a very visible guide in mapping finely the terrain of Languedoc, settling herself into the rhythms of the Beguins' life, dissolving into their atmosphere and environment. The book pulses with an unconcealed sympathy; it is dedicated to the executed Beguins (“requiescant in pace”), and its acknowledgments reiterate the dedication “with respect to those who lost their liberty and their lives in passionate pursuit of their religious aspirations” (xi). Impeccable historical precision thus allies with sympathetic mood and interpretation, as of, say, Beguins' hagiographically consistent testimony to their executed fellows' unfailing fortitude at the stake (“as the flames licked around their feet, the Beguins were all stalwart” [77]). Actions more achingly human than saintly, and wholly comprehensible if not literally admirable—doubt, denial, betraying companions, absconding rather than suffering an excruciating death—are sensitively credited to the strain of victimhood, a laudable independence even from Beguin “orthodoxy,” and loving parenting (115–116, 169). Burnham exhorts readers to “admire their courage and determination,” concluding that “it is time to let the light shine through the clouds once again” (177, 188).

The union of drama and intimacy then responds to and reflects Burnham's open self-identification as an affectionate fautrix beguinorum. This identification both demands and explains her near presence, and interrelates with the book's structure of stark, deadly opposition between pious Christians devoutly and in increasing desperation averring poverty, and church leadership manifest only in its mistaken “cruelty” (75). In this presentation, and by seeking to publicize the hardships and virtues of those who conducted that “passionate pursuit” (xi) Burnham is heir to Beguins who collected relics at execution sites, defended their slain colleagues' sanctity to inquisitors, or treasured a martyrology. (Persecuting smoke may have obscured their light, but it ironically brightened it too.) The close attachment to “personaliz[ing] their struggle” (14) does, however, subdue a more panoramic view of Beguins' significance for other pertinent fourteenth-century dynamics: lay religiosity, biblical interpretation, ideologies of the papacy. The short-lived Beguins' actions were shaped by apocalypticism, and perhaps there was little but the confrontations and escapes that fed it. But Burnham's own commitment generates further curiosity about the “religious aspirations” she eulogistically notes, about what peaceful success beyond “struggle”—not for the Spirituals, but for their own lay lives—would have looked like and meant.

So Great a Light's forthright intention that we not only meet the Beguins, but also esteem them, situates it notably within current scholarship on medieval heresy. It clearly continues the 1970s and 1980s tradition of historians like Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, whose opposition of lay religious autonomy to blunt orthodox obstructionism, brilliant surveying of terroir, and flair for presenting data visually Burnham has inherited. But Burnham recognizes the succeeding skeptical call to problematize the use of mediated inquisitorial texts that, pace Ladurie, cannot be read as transparent windows onto “lay belief,” and the related interest to deconstruct “heresy” and heresies as discursive clerical fantasy (5–6, 57–59). If the former approach risked its own fantasies about heresy, the latter exchanges courageous, creative rebels for empty, ecclesiastically tailored costumes. While to study that tailoring has its own historical rewards for scholars like Mark Gregory Pegg, it displaces or denies recapturing the “religious aspirations” of those deemed heretics. Burnham here significantly seeks to restore knowable heretics to the center in a reading that is, finally, faithful. It is difficult to conclude whether Burnham's confessed faith in the Beguins, or her faith in the past's power to present them before us, is most invigorating, but readers may end with their own greatest faith in Burnham's impressive ability to forge in her work a passionate alliance of equally deep erudition and engagement.