Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)

Ideas of heresy are indeed in transition, not only across the chronological span indicated in the title of this stimulating collection of essays, but also within the modern academy. Intellectual and temporal divisions once considered self-evident (such as the boundary between heresy and orthodoxy, or between medieval and early modern) are disintegrating under new approaches and analyses. Particularly irksome to scholars in recent years has been the traditional emphasis on disjuncture between the Catholic medieval and the Protestant early modern, a division which has artificially severed important continuities and unhelpfully polarized an otherwise diverse spectrum of reform, religiosity, and repression. According to the editors of this volume, the crucial transformations that unfolded between the years 1300 and 1700 demand sustained diachronic attention, challenging "the scholarly imagination to recover medieval understandings of heresy and then to chart their transformation during the early modern period." By tracking the single potent concept of heresy across hitherto divided centuries and confessions, the contributors offer an important new perspective on a vital subject.

This is not a book about heretics: its subject is instead those who thought about heresy, and how their ideas changed over time. As lively discussions continue over the ethics (or even the possibility) of "finding heretics" in the past, the essays here both sidestep and contribute to the debate by charting the historical foundations of such scholarship itself. Imitating its object, the volume is organized to "straddle the transition" between medieval and early modern constructions of heresy. The thirteen essays proceed with disciplined regularity across the Middle Ages and sixteenth century up through the Enlightenment, in many cases overlapping in productive and provocative ways. This chronological organization allows thematic shifts and their implications to emerge gradually: first, constructions of heresy up through the fifteenth century (Paul Antony Hayward, Sabina Flanagan, Takashi Shogimen, Cary Nederman); second, the uses of heresy as an intellectual tool or productive concept (Constant Mews, Thomas Fudge, Craig D'Alton, Conal Condren); and third, reception and reconstructions of heresy in early modern historiography (Thomas Ahnert, John Christian Laursen, Ian Hunter, Gisela Schlüter, Sandra Pott). While regionally focused on Germany and England, the essays explore a fine network of interpretive contexts, ranging from post-Conquest political rhetoric to Staatskirchenrecht in the German Enlightenment, and from thirteenth-century notions of madness to eighteenth-century strategies of scholarly impartiality. Figures such as Otto of Freising, William of Ockham, Nicole Oresme, Aeneas Sylvius, John Colet, and Baruch Spinoza figure prominently, as do the familiar heretical constructs of Albigensian, Lollard, and Hussite. The volume concludes with Sandra Potts's study of the meaning of Albigensians in ecclesiastical texts between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, an analysis that neatly hinges medieval practice with modern cultural memory, thus providing a fitting endpoint for the study.

The picture which emerges from the thirteen individual essays is simultaneously general and detailed. The reader gains an impression of heresy's gradual transition from a technical juridical construct to a widely applicable cultural charge and historical category, but is also forced to confront the complexity of specific models and moments along the way which evade simple classification. As set forth in the volume's brief but thoughtful introduction, there is a difference between medieval and early modern notions of heresy, but the transition is far more subtle and complex than simple chronological or confessional frameworks might suggest. For this reason, the volume might have been strengthened by a final essay that offered some preliminary conclusions about ideas of heresy across pre-modern Europe. On the other hand, the interpretation of such changes is (as the editors note) profoundly historical and no doubt subject to further change. Perhaps it is thus too early for sweeping generalizations, and the editors have done well to give readers a starting point from which to construct their own ideas of heresy in...