Students learning about medieval heresy have for some time now had several textbooks available to them, of which the most prominent has been Malcolm Lambert's excellent survey, now in its third edition, (Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 3rd ed. [Oxford: Blackwell, 2002]) and the collection of translated sources by Wakefield and Evans (Heresies of the High Middle Ages [New York: Columbia University Press, 1969; repr. 1991]), which in the breadth of its scope and the quality of its notes also serves as a kind of textbook in its own right. Writing a textbook that offers something new to this field, then, presents a serious challenge, one that is successfully met by Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane in this clear and useful book.
The aim of this book is different from previous surveys. Although it includes concise contextual details for each of the topics it covers, it is not concerned to provide a survey of medieval heresy and inquisition, but rather to address the ways in which historians have approached these subjects, and the questions and interpretations that have arisen in the last few decades, under pressure from deconstructionist and text-centered readings. The introduction sets up this strategy with a discussion of the methodological issues and historiographical viewpoints that is designed to allow the reader to navigate the materials in the rest of the book critically, and does this in an open and accessible manner that in fact characterizes the book as a whole.
The book explores examples of both heresy and inquisition, and of their interaction, progressing chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. Authority and how that defines the boundary between heterodox and orthodox, between heretics and those attempting to control them, is the running theme of the book. “Heresy” here is understood broadly to include opposition to authority driven by heterodox ideas, whatever they may be. Contextualization for these ideas is provided throughout, in the form of maps and pictures, and extensive quotation from the sources. In each case, the sources are approached in terms of basic questions, which makes the historiographical and methodological difficulties clear and the secondary discussion accessible. A bibliography is included at end of each chapter, for which the preceding discussion aims to provide critical tools.
The first two chapters trace the parallel developments through the twelfth century of, on the one hand, dualist heresies and ecclesiastical responses to them, and, on the other, the movements that were driven by ideas of poverty and renewed conceptions of apostolic life, in particular the Poor of Lyon. These are placed squarely in the broader traditions of wandering preachers. In both cases, and throughout the book, Deane is careful to use these groups' own names for themselves, so far as these can be known.
Chapter 3 moves us into the thirteenth century, and the concerted church response to both these developments that began in earnest with Innocent III, the mendicant orders, and the use of inquisitorial procedure against heresy. Deane is careful to emphasize the confluence of these factors, and to see anti-heresy as part of a wider programme of reform and the assertion of ecclesiastical authority. Chapter 4 returns to the theme of piety and the conflicts that it generated, specifically the case of the spiritual Franciscans, and here again Deane does a good job of connecting the spirituals both to the broader trends of lay piety and religious reform, and to the problems specific to the order itself. A useful summary of these issues is provided, as well as very accessible introductions to some quite difficult ideas.
With fourteenth-century mysticism and female piety, the role of poverty as an idea is still held in the foreground, but Deane also takes in class and social composition, as well as vernacular literacy. Authority again is at the heart of the relationship between the church and the mystics. The treatment of magic and demonology in chapter 6 develops the connections between different social groups to show the ways in which conceptions of academic magic and necromancy were conflated with, and imposed upon those of popular magic. The last two chapters look at the movements that were connected to the ideas of Wyclif. Both Lollardy and the Hussite movement are examined in terms of their reverberations through the political realm. Deane examines how Wyclif's ideas were translated into lay circles, and how they formed part of a complex of ideas that changed over time and within political circumstances. She is careful to show the ways in which ideas, political developments, the social composition of movements, and spiritual motives are intertwined. In this respect, Deane is more in the tradition of Herbert Grundmann's treatment of religious movements than the textbooks on heresy (Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. S. Rowan (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995; orig. Berlin: E. Ebering, 1935).
The conclusion to this last chapter is key to the theme of book, namely, that heresy and inquisition are the most obvious manifestations of the tension between heterodox ideas and the authorities that try to control them, the difference in the case of the Hussites being that suppression is not successful and reform ensues. This brings typically medieval heretical movements to an end, in Deane's view, because it also represents the end of a unified Roman church. In this pluralist situation, “heresy” loses its specificity, and becomes a nebulous accusation that is used by both sides but without precision. Repression, on the other hand, has become more institutional. Deane is not denying continuities between the “medieval” and the “early modern” here, but is pointing out that both heresy and its repression are changed qualitatively from what we would recognize as their medieval varieties.
This book will not replace Lambert, and it is not intended to. It is not attempting to provide an exhaustive reference book to medieval heresy, but an account of thinking about heresy, both contemporary and historiographical. It is a guide to the sources and to their modern commentators, which, used in conjunction with those other textbooks, will be invaluable for undergraduates and their tutors trying to navigate these increasingly choppy waters.
