L'Église et le droit dans le Midi (XIIIe-XIVe siècles) (review)

790BOOK REVIEWS casional efforts to curtaU it.The mid-fifteenth-century campaigns for the canonizations of Catherine and Bernardino enhanced civic pride without abating the Virgin's popularity. Webb's decision not to discuss the vast literatures on Catherine and Bernardino is circumspect, and echoes choices taken for earlier periods. She draws fruitfuUy on the insights of Peter Brown, Patrick Geary, and Miri Rubin on saints' cults and rituals, and on the contributions of Chiara Frugoni, Alba Maria OrseUi, RichardTrexler, and André Vauchez on the ItaUan context.The resulting panorama she offers is broad, richly detaUed, and surveyed with wit and acuity. It is an important reminder that in Italy the Church's eleventh-century reclamation of its sacrality was accompanied by new lay claims on spiritual power as well, and that strategies to control and manipulate legitimating sacred power were central to the construction of the Renaissance state. David S. Peterson Newberry Library L'Église et le droit dans le Midi (XIIF-XlV siècles). [Cahiers de Fanjeaux No. 29. Collection d'histoUe reUgieuse du Languedoc aux XIIP et XIVe siècles.] (Toulouse: Éditions Privat. 1994. Pp. 448. 165 F paperback.) This volume is a coUection of papers presented at a coUoquy held in 1993, the twenty-ninth in a series treating the reUgious history of the Midi. It is organized under three headings: canonists and their works; the birth and growth of canon law in the Midi; and the implementation of canon law. Henri GUles has compUed a very useful biographical Usting of over fifty professors at the University of Toulouse in the fourteenth century. He has also traced the teaching careers of a number of Benedictine abbots. García y García investigated five Ubraries which hold the most important juridical sources of the medieval period. In addition to unearthing several manuscripts previously unknown, he has caUed attention to some Spanish adaptations of Méridionale canonical works as weU as Spanish texts inspired by them. HenriVidal surveyed thirteen councils held in the Narbonne-Albi region during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The 489 canons adopted, though very juridical in character , are not concerned with poUtical events or with theology, much less with Scripture and custom; rather they borrow from previous ecumenical and provincial councils.The canons dealing with Jews are a case in point. Jacques Paul's paper on the clerk's register of the Carcassonne inquisition for the years 1249-1258 proposes a procedure against heretics quite dUferent from that known from the register ofJacques Fournier or the sentences of Bernard Gui. Instead of preventive detention, the judges would release the accused on bail guaranteed by the fidejussors.The individual was obliged under oath to submit book reviews791 beforehand to the future penance. His condition was thereby changed from that of a guUty party to that of a penitent. Canon law, as outlined by JacquesVerger, began to be taught in the universities of the Midi (Toulouse, MontpeUier, Avignon) during the course of the thirteenth century. By the fourteenth it was the discipline that attracted the most students, even U Roman law was more prestigious. The statutes provide a detaUed knowledge of the program of studies: the curricula, the teaching methods , and the examinations.The main text was the Decretals of Gregory LX. In all, there are fourteen essays by thirteen contributors, mostly university professors from the south of France. John E. Lynch The Catholic University ofAmerica Processus Bernardi Delitiosi: The Trial of Fr. Bernard Délicieux, 3 Septembers December 1319- ByAlan Friedlander. [Transactions of the American PhUosophical Society,Vol. 86,Pt. 1.] (PhUadelphia:American PhUosophical Society. 1996. Pp. xn, 393. $30.00.) Prominent in modern accounts of late Languedocian Catharism are the activities of two wandering Cathar perfects, GuiUaume Pages and Bernard Costa, attested in depositions which now survive in a seventeenth-century copy, MS Paris BN Doat 26. In 1319 a Franciscan expressed skepticism about the truth of these depositions and the real existence of the two perfects: in his way, attempting what Robert Lerner achieved on a broader scale in his 'Heresy'ofthe 'Free Spirit' (197'3), where a sect which had been prominent until then in histories of heresy was demonstrated to be...