The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors (review)

As Karen Sullivan knows, three of the seven titular figures in The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors were not inquisitors. Yet if it is reasonably simple to identify an inquisitor, defining “inner lives” is more problematic. Aware of the difficulties surrounding medieval interiority, Sullivan signifies by “inner lives” inquisitors’ “thoughts and feelings” (p. 3) toward suspected heretics: how they imagined and approached them, the premises of their anti-heretical activity. Yet as the real disposition of “the inquisitor as a historical subject in the world” (p. 3) is inaccessible, these inner lives are “subjective fiction” (p. 4), strictly textual and representational. Textualized inner lives are retrievable; moreover, the “literary inquisitor” offers “a closer view” (p. 4) than possible even if we knew, or were, his historical self.

This allows Sullivan to depart from “virtually all” recent scholarship on medieval heresy inquisitions (p. 24). She sees this as dominated by deterministic structures and discourses, and rejects “the tendency of a certain kind of historical scholarship to emphasize historical circumstances,” and change over time, “over individual cases” (p. 113; cf. p. 103). Her concern is with agency and decision, moments when persons cross the grain of a contemporary mentality unable solely to explain their conduct or sentiments. “Individual cases” constitute the book’s seven chapters, which are further organized by a binary of zeal (represented by St. Bernard of Clairvaux, Conrad of Marburg, Bernard Gui, and Nicholas Eymeric) and charity (St. Dominic Guzmán, St. Peter Martyr, Brother Bernard Délicieux) into which Sullivan divides dispositions toward heretics.

Unsurprisingly from a scholar de-emphasizing “historical circumstances,” the case studies generally offer very tight foci. Their close readings are thoughtful and attentive. To Sullivan, the inner life prehensible in all texts—by inquisitors and by others writing about them—co-construct a single, consistent whole. Although this is again consonant with her frank departure from context and change, historians may be discomfited by its occluded tensions. For example, Sullivan’s analysis of a “loving” Dominic omits or softens zealous choices made by him and by those later memorializing him. In one instance, Sullivan argues that although historian Étienne de Salanhac credited Dominic with Diego of Osma’s angry prediction of the Albigensian Crusade (“the staff will prevail where the blessing does not”), a still-charitable Dominic “merely foresees that this suffering will occur and regrets its unfortunate necessity” (p. 73). However, in Étienne’s account, Dominic rendered the prophecy as promise, warning his listeners that concitabimus adversum vos principes et prelatos bringing death and destruction. Sullivan strangely translates concitabimus as “you will arouse,” transferring the violence’s source from the “we” of Dominic and his companions (p. 73).

This instantiates for the historian the complications of a zeal/charity binary and, relatedly, of merging diverse representations. Committed to each “inner life” as a trans-temporal unity, Sullivan does not dismantle why an author crafted a certain persona. Consequently, she sometimes appears to describe precisely a “real” disposition held by “a historical subject in the world,” with authors helpless to do aught but replicate it. Sullivan, ironically, withholds “thoughts and feelings” about heresy from writers who were themselves motivated agents able to defy contemporary mentality. Even when produced by another, each textual disposition restrictively redounds only to its “inquisitor” and was not reflective of, or vulnerable to, other dispositions toward heretics.

Structural history might be faulted for diminishing the agency of inquisitors who burned fellow Christians, granting them a passivity that can seem exculpatory. Despite the care and craft of Sullivan’s readings, her literary imaginaires also cannot explain that horror. Perhaps nothing can.