Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade in Occitania, 1145-1229: Preaching in the Lord's Vineyard (review)

With this monograph Beverly Mayne Kienzle has opened up an extremely important line of inquiry concerning the history of persecution, preaching, and the cultural construction of heresy and dissidence leading up to the campaigns of the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229). Kienzle analyzes the composition and preaching of sermons against heresy delivered in Occitania from 1145 to 1229 by Cistercian monks. Although only five sermon texts from the Cistercian anti-heretical campaigns survive, Kienzle does much to fill in the textual lacunae she faces by examining chronicles, letters (which she argues vigorously and provocatively could have been read aloud as sermons), treatises, statutes, exampla, and other texts (p. 10). Kienzle employs a twofold methodology to these sources that entails both "reconstructing the preaching of individual Cistercians and collaborative campaigns; and deconstructing the rhetoric of the same preaching to reveal the strategies that the monks utilized against their adversaries" (p. 202). She is very good at contextualizing the Cistercian anti-heretical perspective, particularly in her detailed examination of the twelfth-century monastic milieu for preaching that drew monks out of their cloisters and into public places like the schools of Paris.

In 1145 Bernard of Clairvaux set a new course for the Cistercian Order by undertaking a preaching mission against heretical groups in southern France. He compared his public work outside the monastery walls to preaching in the "Lord's Vineyard," which was a necessary extension of preaching in the "domestic vineyard," that of the cloister. Kienzle borrows this metaphor throughout her study as she analyzes the tensions surrounding the role of Cistercian monks in the world. As much as the sources allow, she traces the style and content of the sermons preached by Bernard and his successors in the south: Henry of Clairvaux, Arnaud Amaury, Guy of les Vaux-des-Cernay, Fulk of Toulouse, and the less well-known trouvère turned monk Hélinand of Froidmont. Kienzle uncovers a storehouse of imagery culled from the Old and New Testament alike from which Cistercian preachers constructed an evolving image of dissidence that was ultimately persecuted as heresy. As the author carefully demonstrates, heretics were described by common typologies as the defiling animals that destroy crops such as foxes, serpents, dogs, and moths; or as ravaging wolves in sheep's clothing, or more bluntly, as dissidents who heed "deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons" whose infection "spreads like gangrene." Kienzle is able to delineate a taxonomy of rhetorical patterns that fall into categories of "demonization, pollution, threat to the social order and apocalypticism" (p. 215).

None of the images that Kienzle finds is particularly surprising, but the cumulative force of the rhetoric, as it is repeated and crafted over the course of eighty years, is arresting. By the time Hélinand of Froidmont preached to the Toulouse synod in November of 1229, following the Treaty of Meaux/ Paris that formally ended the Albigensian Crusade, he was able to set heresy in an historical continuum that stretched from the time of the Desert Fathers to his own day, constructing the heretic, like the poor, as someone who has always been and will always be present. Yet this reading touches on a weakness in the book pointed out by Mark Pegg in his review (Speculum, 77 [2002], 1331-1332). Kienzle's textual arguments do not always sit comfortably within the historical framework she adopts. As Pegg points out, her reading of the sermons is framed by a conviction that the Cistercians were preaching in opposition to an already well-established "Cathar" church, yet very little in the sermon texts themselves, as she presents them, seems to substantiate this idea. As a result, a potentially more subtle reading of heresy and its multifaceted perceptions is sapped of its potential. If we were to privilege fully the sermon texts over and above a crafted historical narrative, a more complex picture might...