'So Great a Light, So Great a Smoke': The Beguin Heretics of Languedoc (review)

This landmark study of a short-lived but influential religious movement is a revised version of Louisa Burnham's doctoral dissertation of 2000 and takes account of current developments in an exciting field (notably, David Burr's The Spiritual Franciscans (2001), and Jean de Roquetaillade's recently discovered Sexdequiloquium). Her major contributions to the subject are her study of the Beguin martyrologies, one of which appears here as an appendix, her reinterpretation of Na Prous Boneta as a charismatic woman leader, and her unpicking of the features of Languedocian society that sustained the movement during the 1320s. Burnham's meticulous research and engaging narrative bring out the extent to which the Beguins depended on familial and local loyalties, and sometimes on official corruption, to survive. The Languedoc's rigorist Franciscans and Tertiaries were similar to the Italian fraticelli in their radical interpretation of evangelical poverty as usus pauper. They also built a cult around the writings and the tomb of the controversial friar Petrus Iohannis Olivi (d. 1298). In the late thirteenth century, the 'Spirituals' were a living challenge to the increasingly wealthy and powerful Franciscan 'community'. When Pope John XXII launched a systematic persecution of the Spirituals in 1317, it seemed as if Olivi's apocalyptic prophecies had come to pass. Burnham's case studies chart subsequent events in vivid detail: how public executions, for instance, inspired lay men and women to join the movement; the development of a more extreme ideology; and the preservation of the relics and names of Beguini combusti, along with copies and vernacular translations of Olivi's writings. Some Beguins came to welcome martyrdom, and, as Burnham comments, although it may be difficult to distinguish it from suicide, 'martyrdom is also intrinsically a political act' (p. 84). Several Beguins cited witnessing an execution as their moment of conversion. Burnham traces the 'safe houses' and 'underground railroad' that took some fugitives to havens abroad. She also explores attempts that were made to undo some of the impact of the persecution on the reputation of individuals. Burnham admires the Beguins, noting that they emerged in a region that was already 'a hotbed of heresy' and had suffered waves of persecution for over a century. At times, this leads her to underplay the more complex responses of mainstream Franciscans, and in this respect David Burr's work makes a suitable complement for her study. She takes her title from the words of a woman Beguin: 'her heart began to marvel that so great a light as the great light that they revealed could be changed so quickly to so great a smoke'. This enduring 'smoke' is traced in her last chapter. Burnham aims to reclaim the Beguins from the modern marketing of the Languedoc exclusively in terms of the Cathars, and to note how resonant their story can be in the modern era.