Religion, Power, and Resistance from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries: Playing the Heresy Card ed. by Karen Bollermann, Thomas M. Izbicki and Cary J. Nederman (review)

This collection situates itself as a refutation of R. I. Moore’s thesis that heresy was the product of a ‘persecuting society’, by focusing on the political background of particular cases. Karen Bollerman and Cary J. Nederman compare the trials of Peter Abelard and Gilbert of Poitiers, both of whom were vehemently pursued by Bernard, the powerful abbot of Clairvaux. The different outcomes were influenced not only by the contrast between the arrogant Abelard and the restrained Gilbert but also by the determination of the pope and cardinals to affirm papal authority against the charismatic abbot. Abelard also suffered from the revolutionary activities of his former pupil, Arnold of Brescia. Against Moore’s dismissal of such conflicts as personal squabbles around minor doctrinal differences, Bollerman and Nederman argue that the participants understood these quarrels to have widespread institutional and political implications.

The remaining papers develop this theme without engaging Moore directly. Andrew Larsen shows that heresy accusations in late fourteenth-century Oxford involved both conflicts within the Church and the patronage of nobles, such as John of Gaunt who protected Wyclif. Papal schism, a disputed imperial election, and popular unrest provided the backdrop to the prosecution of Wyclif’s Bohemian follower, Jan Hus. As Thomas A. Fudge implicitly recognises, the inquisitorial machinery mobilised against Hus, and his flat refusal to obey the Church, brings his case within the ambit of Moore’s ‘persecuting society’. Henry Ansgar Kelly responds to a recent attempt by Daniel Hobbins to rehabilitate the judge in Joan of Arc’s trial. Kelly argues that neither Bishop Cauchon nor the assessors from the University of Paris followed due process, despite Joan’s pleas and contemporary criticism. A woman’s wearing of male clothing was not heresy, hearing saints was not invoking demons, and in the end, it remains unclear of what it was that Joan was actually convicted. The political background of the trial and Cauchon’s payment for the conviction are well known.

Guido Terreni was the first to see Joachim of Fiore’s exegetical method as heretical. Thomas Turley concludes that although Guido branded Joachim a heresiarch, he failed to shift the established understanding of heresy. Frank Godhardt argues that the pope condemned Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis, in 1327 without having read it, presumably on the basis of oral reports from Ludwig of Bavaria’s court. The condemnation misrepresented Marsilius’s work as a claim for imperial supremacy, rather than as a treatise on secular lordship. The fifteenth-century papal apologist, Cardinal Juan de Torquemada, attacked both Marsilius and Ockham as the proponents of conciliarism. Thomas M. Izbicki concludes that Torquemada had only read the papal condemnation. In contrast, he used Ockham extensively on ecclesiastical governance while vigorously opposing Ockham’s anti-papal views. Ockham thought Pope John XXII had fallen into heresy by condemning apostolic poverty. Takashi Shogimen traces Ockham’s influence on the sixteenth-century Parisian theologian, Jacques Almain. Almain used Ockham but moved towards conciliarism, whereas Ockham had denied ecclesiastical authority in favour of a correct understanding of fundamental texts. Shogimen agrees with Moore that heresy is essentially about contested authority.

John Philip Lomax explores the legal arguments around infidelity in the twelfth-century quarrels of Frederick II with the papacy. Both claimed that the other had persistently broken oaths, and both attempted, quite unconvincingly, to accuse the other of heresy. Jerry B. Pierce demonstrates that far from being feared predators upon the peasantry of Valsesia, Fra Dolcino and the Apostolics were welcomed as genuine followers of the apostolic life, fleeing inquisitorial persecution, by a peasantry determined to resist the escalating pressures of ecclesiastical and secular lords. The volume concludes with a sudden leap to the side as Bettina Koch...