Although titled Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, this book is more directly about inquisitorial practices and mentalities. Specifically, it “explores how inquisition into heresy was once again reshaped in a very particular setting” (3), namely German-speaking central Europe at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries. The focus is on the career and writings of Petrus Zwicker, who conducted a series of inquisitions across several German dioceses from the 1390s until 1404 and who wrote Cum dormirent homines, “the most important anti-Waldensian text of the later Middle Ages” (38).
In terms of its textual source base, this study concentrates on Zwicker's works and related inquisitorial texts. Although many of these are known, Välimäki has gone back intensively to the manuscripts, and the book ends with over thirty pages of appendices chock-full of manuscript information. Among the signal technical achievements here is that Välimäki is able to confidently identify what was previously thought to be an entirely separate work, known as Refutatio errorum, as having been written by Zwicker or at least by those in his immediate circle. Refutatio errorum was often copied alongside Cum dormirent homines, and it was clear that they shared similar concerns, but previous scholarship had associated the text only loosely with Zwicker. The much tighter connection established by Välimäki casts Zwicker's more famous treatise in new light, highlighting the uniqueness of his thought and approach to heresy, and hence the greater influence he exerted on inquisitorial approaches to heresy.
Central to Välimäki's analysis is that Zwicker was an important proponent of the “pastoralization” of heresy. Rather than seeing heresy primarily as a canonical-legal crime to be investigated and extirpated, Zwicker and his circle saw it as a failure of proper religious instruction to be corrected. This, of course, harkens back to an earlier phase of the Western medieval church's engagement with heresy, when it was primarily a matter for bishops to control, and they did so mainly through preaching and the assignment of penances. Such responses never disappeared, but they took a back seat, beginning in the thirteenth century, to more rigorous and often more violent approaches, typified by the Albigensian Crusade and then the establishment of standing inquisitions in the south of France and elsewhere.
The move back to a more pastoral response is not, for Välimäki, just another swing of some perpetual inquisitorial pendulum. Rather, throughout his book, he contextualizes Zwicker's approach to heresy in terms of both the papal schism ongoing for the whole of Zwicker's professional life as an inquisitor and the emerging reform movements, many rooted in religious orders, which would soon encompass the whole of the church “in head and members” in the post-schism conciliar epoch to come. The schism obviously destabilized notions of the magisterial power of the theoretically unitary church, calling the more extreme actions sanctioned by that power into question. The reform movements within the church almost all stressed pastoral outreach as a way to extend reformist currents.
One aspect of Zwicker's approach strongly highlighted by Välimäki is that the inquisitor tried to respond to heretical positions and counter heretical arguments almost entirely from scriptural authority. According to Välimäki, this “exclusively Biblicist argumentation” is an “almost unique feature within the whole genre of the medieval anti-heretical polemical treatise” (102). He connects it to concerns about reliance on papal rulings and other forms of ecclesiastical authority in light of the schism. Such concerns were very real in central Europe, and they were especially prevalent in reformist circles around Prague.
Välimäki suggests that Zwicker's writings, although focused on countering Waldensian heresy, actually advanced a much broader agenda. By arguing against the Waldensians almost entirely from the Bible, Zwicker sought to show how most orthodox ecclesiastical practices were securely grounded in scripture. He emphasized supposed Waldensian rejection of the veneration of the Virgin (of which there is little actual evidence) in order to emphasize the cult of the Virgin as an important element of orthodox religiosity. And he used Waldensians’ anti-clericalism to bolster the whole “Catholic cult as administered, supervised and represented by the ordained clergy” in a response to the decline in clerical authority again emerging from the schism (227).
This is an important book that makes several contributions. On one hand, it is a careful and detailed study of Petrus Zwicker, firmly grounded in meticulous manuscript research. New discoveries and insights flow from that. On the other hand, for all its focus, it does not eschew the big picture, and it does not shy away from drawing broad and suggestive connections. When one discusses medieval heresy in general, and the major historiographic arguments and innovations that have been associated with it, one normally finds oneself in southern France or northern Italy, and usually sometime in the twelfth or thirteenth century. There is, then, an assumed lull until the great institutional innovations of the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions and the entirely new religious landscape created by the Reformation. There were, of course, Lollards in England and Hussites in Bohemia, as everyone knows, and they have rich historiographies of their own. But all too rarely have scholars tried (and still less rarely succeeded) in crafting a sense of heresy per se in the later medieval period. The period itself is to blame: a profusion of sources, and a profusion of many more localized forms of religiosity, often carried out now in the vernacular. Välimäki has grounded himself in some of those particulars, as any responsible scholar must, but he also shows how this need not narrow scholarly vision. Anyone interested in late medieval heresy, and indeed late medieval religion, will find something of interest in this excellent book.
