It is now near-heresy to believe that medieval ecclesiastics' wailings and warnings about powerful and well-organized heretical movements can be transparently and trustworthily read, and that we can reliably extract from them a “real” heresy separable from clerical stereotypes indebted to the past. If L. J. Sackville is not a heretica perfecta, she is perhaps suspecta. This important and bold book positions itself against the voluble arguments about heresy as clerical fantasy and construction, which originated with the deconstructions of Robert Lerner and R. I. Moore, and which Monique Zerner, Mark Gregory Pegg, and Uwe Brunn have elaborated upon most recently.

Sackville fears that the “concern to isolate and remove what is constructed, and the tendency to read the texts only for the agenda of those writing them, seems in places to be in danger of extending a similar distortion in the other direction, assuming a text manufactured within a closed and self-referential system” (198). Her corrective is a detailed presentation and analysis of thirteenth-century representations of heresy and heretics, dismantling how clerical images and topoi were not fixed in form and meaning, but were influenced by the function of the texts and the genres in which they were deployed. Chapters are divided by these genres: anti-heretical polemic; edifying texts (summae auctoritatum, exempla, Dominican sources); canonical-legal texts (regional councils, “textbooks”); and inquisition texts (consultations, transcripts, and manuals).

Her final chapter examines more closely three major themes within “the general construction of heresy” visible in the above material: figurative constructions (foxes, false appearance, corruption), number (heretics as a unified movement; heretics as inevitably fragmenting), and ideas of heresy and heretics (154). Sackville's thirteenth-century boundaries and her delineation of those genres—categorized in ways that may be more for modern facility than to replicate medieval taxonomies—produce some surprising gaps. Gerard Segarelli and his Apostolic Brethren are absent, and the list of inquisition records omits the Bologna transcripts edited by Lorenzo Paolini and Raniero Orioli (presumably because they extend into the fourteenth century). Despite a wish to “look across the whole range of what was written” about heresy (9–10), Sackville generally neglects what we might call non-edifying literary sources, with several significant depictions from the period either unmentioned or only cursorily referenced: the poetic debate between cleric Izarn and heretic Sicart; Pierre of les Vaux-de-Cernay's Historia albigensis; Guillaume de Tudèle's Chanson de la croisade albigeoise; Étienne de Salanhac's De quatuor; Guillaume Pelhisson's Chronica. It would be difficult for any catalogue of thirteenth-century “textual representations” of heresy to be exhaustive, and Sackville's outlines are mandatory for every beginner to the field.

References to “realistic” heretics, suggesting that constructed heresy can be distinguished from a genuine equivalent in real, extra-textual, life will likely be controversial (168, 185). My reservation concerns Sackville's sharp and categorical distinction between heresy in the texts as a “legal” crime, on the one hand, or as “theological” or “doctrinal” error on the other (for example, 134, 191–92). “Crime” could denote, of course, either heresy's secular illegality (itself not easily divisible from clerical definitions of error) or its status as a canonical crime to be addressed in ecclesiastical courts. Discussion of Gratian's Decretum for this view implies the latter (192). But as with Sackville's divisions of texts by genre, it is unclear if the either/or she posits was explicitly upheld by her medieval clerics, or if it is more so her own useful interpretive and conceptual tool. The distinction could have benefitted from more discussion of the links—crucial in the attack upon heresy—among canonical crime, sin and penance, and doctrine. And as Sackville associates this legal conception with repression (and, conversely, belief with polemics and academic discussion), it perpetuates a reductive view of inquisitions as unrelated to contemporary penitential theory and practice.

Complicating this is a high threshold for what constitutes the presence of belief or doctrine. For example, Sackville minimizes the role of heretical error in inquisitorial texts: “any ‘belief’ on the part of the follower is . . . little more [italics added] than a statement of spiritual belief in salvific qualities of the sect” (131). Point taken, and Sackville notes that inquisitorial texts likely perceived no need to rehearse in detail beliefs associated with supposed heretical groups. But the intimation is that the sense of “crime” is at the expense—or amid the absence—of inquisitors' and canonists' concerns about belief and doctrine. Yet if there was “little more” than statements that another sect could ensure eternal salvation, denying that salvific channels coursed exclusively through a papally centralized clerical hierarchy bore heavy doctrinal weight, precisely because of high-medieval developments in ecclesiology and theology with which heresy inquisitions were connected. Softening a distinction between the legal and the doctrinal in the texts does not connote “real,” rather than constructed, heresy. It does allow us to see how ambitiously and how broadly the Latin church constituted sinful error and instituted spiritual discipline for all Christians in this period.

Sackville concludes that in these representations, “there was more than one construction at work . . . these were neither static constructs nor static texts, not in the topoi they used and not in their use of inherited material” (199). While that complexity, versatility, and adaptability does not exclude clerical construction of heresy, this reminder of the typology's dynamism is perceptive, necessary, and a signal contribution. Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century is a welcome, valuable addition to a vibrant exchange that shows no signs of flagging, having not yet settled, fortunately, into orthodoxy.