Goodbye to Waldensianism?
The noun in the title, 'Waldensianism', denotes one of the two great heretical sects of the high Middle Ages, the other being Catharism. It was founded by a Lyon merchant called Valdes, who was converted to the religious life in the early 1170s and formed a movement which was excommunicated in 1184. The movement bifurcated into the full Waldensians, men and women who took religious vows, and their followers, people who lived within the Catholic Church while receiving some Waldensian instruction in secrecy. So constituted, the movement achieved an extraordinary geographical spread, from the Baltic to the south of Italy. Unlike Catharism it was not destroyed, and eventually what survived into the sixteenth century joined the Protestant reform, retaining its name and sense of history while losing most of its earlier character and identity.
I summarize the history of Waldensianism as it was usually presented up to the 1980s. It was offered with a confidence not shaken by a few ancient myths about Waldensians pre-dating their founder. While it recognized some theological disagreement between two wings of the Waldensians, it accepted the underlying unity and coherence of a movement that had been essentialized in the medieval Latin term 'Valdesia' and in modern European languages as 'Waldensianism', 'Waldensertum' and 'Valdismo'.
This old confidence has now gone, to be replaced by scepticism about the identity, continuity and coherence of Waldensianism. This has been the work of two current historians, one British and one Italian, Euan Cameron and Grado Merlo. Here is how Cameron's The Reformation of the Heretics: The Waldenses of the Alps, 1480–1580 (published 1984) began:
The character of the 'Waldensian' or 'Vaudois' heresy was normally linked with the personality and image of its supposed founder, a merchant of [End Page 03] Lyons called Waldo or Valdes . . . [The] heresy duly spread to areas of southern France, northern Italy, and ultimately, it is claimed, to the Empire as well. We probably can never discover whether there was any historical continuity between the followers of the pious merchant of Lyons and the 'Waldenses' of the south-western Alps whose presence was first officially noticed in the mid-fourteenth century . . . Perhaps no more than a vague resemblance, or a conviction that all new dissent must necessarily follow old patterns, led the churchmen of Embrun and Pinerolo to stamp the epithet of 'Waldensian' on the most self-righteous and self-reliant of their mountain flocks.1
In the same year there appeared in Italian the first of two volumes from Merlo. Their general title, Valdesi e valdismi medievali, expressed succinctly and wittily Merlo's proposition that we should use a plural, thinking of the 'Waldensianisms' of various and different communities that were thus labelled, not a singular 'Waldensianism', with the identity and coherence this word implies.2 A large part of the canon of evidence traditionally used in the history of medieval Waldensianism consists of records of trials that tend to come in large blocks from different areas and times, beginning with Quercy around 1240 and ending in Piedmont in the 1480s. Merlo subjected some of these to intensive, delicate and separate study. The so-called Waldensianism of people questioned from one region at one period came out looking subtly and importantly different from the so-called Waldensianism of people questioned from another community at another time. In each case a very particular local dissidence was revealed, and the brilliance of Merlo's pointilliste paintings of groups in diverse regions makes the reader more sharply aware of the large gaps in between them, geographical and chronological gaps, which earlier historians had bridged with surmise and conjecture. There are, for example, extraordinary gaps in the evidence from thirteenth-century Lombardy. What is now left in the exercise of seeing anything in common between a group questioned in Piedmont in 1387 and another questioned in Stettin on the Baltic five years later, when they look so different? It was upon the basis of such studies that Merlo put forward his semantically deft...
