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

As with all collections of papers by different authors, there is no formal common approach to the various aspects of heresy examined in this volume but the editors have achieved a reasonably similar focus on the shifts in attitude over the period. These are mainly linked to the better known writers such as Thomas Hobbes and Marsiglio of Padua whose works continue to attract new interpretations. The editors introduce the collection by pointing out that heresy is a way in which nearly every religion defines itself. The closer deviance was to orthodoxy, the more horrifying it was to those committed to maintaining the unimpeachable pure belief of spiritual vision. The extent to which abstruse theological distinctions underlie fierce doctrinal debate is most effectively demonstrated in Constant Mews' article on some minor players at the time of the great controversy between Abelard and Bernard of Clairvaux.

Over two thousand years the Christian Church identified a wider range and a greater number of heresies than most other religions and, when secular authorities did not protected the heretics, took drastic measures to persuade the heretic to recant and to extirpate the false doctrine. Heresy, of course, is a word like a box that at different times may hold many different ideas and so some articles are dealing with definitions and identifications that are not the same. The editors suggest that the articles show a profound change in culture in the eighteenth century which means that present day scholars can barely imagine the mind-set that produced medieval attitudes to heresy. This is the task some of the authors have set themselves while others seek to explain how the change came about as part of the historical search for truth.

Few periods were wholly free from contamination by heterodox contacts, though England, from Bede to the early twelfth century, is so regarded. Cultural ignorance in English literary circles has suddenly become a fashionable basis on which to build a view of unsullied traditional thought about anything from Jews to church authority. Hayward's essay explains the lack of concern with heresy in the writings after 1066 by the bias of the historians towards those who resented the great Norman prelates.

Orthodox explanations of heresy varied at different times. Sabina Flanagan, dealing with the period around the fourth Lateran Council when various new formulations were being established and the relationship between clerical and secular power formalized, suggests that its establishment of a link between heresy and madness, involving as it does medieval ideas about the relationship of body, soul and spirit and the role of the Devil, deserves more emphasis for the time than it has so far received although it was finally set aside by the inquisitors. It was not, however, totally ignored as Aeneas Sylvius includes it in his account of the Hussites.

The hinge which marked a shift in thought about heresy is argued to be the Reformation when Ockham's theological definition of heresy as a deliberate choice to dissent from the truths manifested in scripture, and Marsiglio and Nicholas of Oresme's requirement for a return to early Christian organization, influenced the mind-set of the reformers. Indeed, it had already influenced the Hussites as Thomas A. Fudge demonstrates.

Two sub-themes can be identified in the different articles. The first is the relevance of the historical context in which intellectuals such as Nicholas of Oresme wrote; the second is the smothering of innovative academic thought by Church courts. Manipulation of legal procedure in order to 'enhance efficiency' (p. 59) in convicting criminals was introduced by Innocent III. Takashi Shogimen investigates it in reappraising William of Ockham's ideas about heresy. He shows that academia was not immune from the effects of a biased process although ecclesiastical process is not unique in this nor is it unknown today...