Bernard Gui, inquisitor of Toulouse and author of the manual Practica inquisitionis hereticae pravitatis, is more famous than Nicholas Eymerich, controversial inquisitor in Aragon who composed his own manual, Directorium inquisitorum. But as specialists know, it was Eymerich's manual that enjoyed the more visible and enduring influence through its printing, commentary by Francisco Peña in the late sixteenth century, and use in the Spanish Inquisition. In this monograph, Derek Hill examines the differences between the two Dominicans, viewing them as representatives of different inquisitorial eras and, relatedly, of an evolution in thinking on heresy.

After a brief introduction, chapter 1 sketches an overview of their careers and contexts. Chapter 2 offers close readings of the two manuals, with attention to two contemporaries: the layman Zanchino Ugolini's Tractatus super materia hereticorum and the anonymous De officio inquisitionis. Chapter 3 considers the necessary relationships with secular authorities and other ecclesiastics. Chapters 4 and 5 focus on procedure and the work of inquisition from detection to sentencing, while chapter 6 summarizes changes in fourteenth-century views of heresy that in turn influenced inquisition.

Gui and Eymerich here are managers tasked with a duty, and Hill's evaluation is fundamentally about how capably and temperately each one performed it. Who ran the superior operation? To Hill, Gui was better at his job than Eymerich was at his, less hotheaded and bold. The argument is driven by the view that each had a transparent, established job description furnished by canon law and papal remit. While Gui knew his purview, Eymerich exceeded the limits of what my employer would call his “position description.” Hill's distinctions between the two inquisitors are categorical. Gui did not conceive of heresy as diabolical; Eymerich did. Gui did not foresee an eternal inquisition with ever-reviving heresies; Eymerich did. Gui saw heresy as consisting in those belonging to identifiable, existing groups; Eymerich saw heresy as something potentially embedded and discoverable in anyone's behavior. Gui was faced with “clearly heterodox” established groups of heretics “outside” the church; by Eymerich's time, heresies “within the church” “were becoming more varied and less capable of a single definitive description” (220). Gui was a moderate who “use[d] his discretion humanely”; Eymerich deployed torture readily (123).

Some of these distinctions warrant more discussion. (Why were Waldensians “outside” the church, but Béguins inside it?) They also sometimes rest upon charity toward Gui. For example, Hill asserts affirmatively that “Eymerich differs from Gui substantially in that he attempts to extend the inquisition's jurisdiction over non-Christians” (193). At the same time, Hill acknowledges that Bernard Gui burned the Talmud, that his manual condemned Judaism as blasphemy, and that he imposed fines as punishments upon unconverted Jews. To Hill, these activities were not the extension of inquisition's jurisdiction to non-Christians, because Gui, unlike Eymerich, did not target “all Jews” but only those helping to “rejudaize” converts to Christianity (204, 220). Specifically, Hill rejects Gui's Talmud burning as an extension of inquisitorial jurisdiction to all Jews by arguing that “Gui had burned the Talmud, but only as part of a wider anti-Semitic campaign started by the king of France” (216, emphasis added). Even if one agrees—detaching Gui's burning of the Talmud from the legacy of Pope Gregory IX and Nicholas Donin—we still have his self-identification as “inquisitor . . . of Jewish perfidy,” his manual's association of blasphemy with all Jews, its discussion of Jews’ grateful prayers for not being Christian, and its description of Jews as enemies who saw Christianity itself as heresy. We can more simply ask why Gui included passages about Jewish hostility and blasphemy in an inquisitorial text intended to serve as a practical manual. And by Gui's time, the church had already involved itself in punishing internal Jewish heresy.

Hill recognizes that impressions of difference may derive from the limited sources we have about both men's careers. But does the context of their careers or instead the mens’ characters explain why Eymerich was a harsher and more expansive inquisitor than Gui? The book's treatment of Gui and Eymerich could be an argument about geography and context (inquisition in southern France versus inquisition in Aragon); it could be an argument of change over time (circumstances regarding heresy had changed by the point of Eymerich's activity); it could be an argument about personal character (Gui was more “humane” [207], less ambitious, than Eymerich). Hill acknowledges and treats all of these. But both harmonizing and untangling these factors is a challenge, especially in drawing broader conclusions about inquisition in the fourteenth century. Hill's comparison of the two as a means to consider the fourteenth century reminded me of the naturalism of Émile Zola: What determinatively happens when a figure with the inherent characteristics of X lands in a situation of Y? How would Eymerich have acted as inquisitor in Gui's context? Would Gui have been a less “humane” inquisitor when faced with the differences in heresy perceived by Hill?

Hill is understandably hesitant to wade into the salty debate about heresy-as-construction. But a key argument in this text is that Gui accepted the obviously heretical groups he was given and Eymerich sought out errant belief wherever he could find it in order to brand it as heresy. Because there were new, additional heresies “inside” the church, Eymerich supported an “eternal inquisition.” The questions of whether heresy could ever be exhausted or eradicated, what distinguished inside and outside the church, who heretics were and why they were called so are then crucial to the book. In Hill's view: “The Cathars might have disappeared, but other heretical groups and individuals continued to appear. The need for the inquisition became permanent” (220). This is, fascinatingly, exactly the position against which R. I. Moore formed his theory of a “persecuting society” in 1987. Why did the church persecute heretics? Because there were so many of them. The difference is period; what Moore's interlocutors saw for the twelfth century, Hill identifies for the fourteenth. Hill, of course, might disagree with Moore, but the book should acknowledge more pointedly that this is an intervention in the debate.

It has become sadly common in reviews to observe the inverse relationship between a book's price and the quality of its copyediting and indexing. I regretfully follow this new tradition. In this nearly hundred-dollar monograph, there are several errors, typographical and otherwise (e.g. “Spengler,” not Sprenger, as the possible co-author of the Malleus maleficarum). Names are sometimes given correctly and sometimes not (“Ullman,” “Patschofsky,” and my own, “Christina”). The author's tendency not to fully identify people when first mentioning them in the text (“Nider,” “Gandinus,” “Peña”) did not always inspire the indexer to seek out complete names.

Hill's attention to these inquisitors and their manuals is welcome, and he has expended a great deal of care on these close readings. As historians of heresy and inquisition rightfully turn more attention to the fourteenth century, this book will help us better understand a century of undeniable change in which inquisitiones were becoming “the Inquisition.”