Quellen zur Geschichte der Waldenser von Straβburg (1400–1401), and: Ketzer in der Stadt: Der Prozess gegen die Straβburger Waldenser von 1400 (review)

To three landmark editions of trial documents concerning late-medieval German Waldensians—by Dietrich Kurze for Brandenburg and Pomerania, Alexander Patschovsky for southern Bohemia, and Katrin Utz Tremp for Freiburg im Üchtland—can now be added a fourth, Georg Modestin’s superb edition of documents concerning a trial of Waldensians in Strassburg in 1400. Modestin’s edition, rendered all the more useful by his companion analytical volume, Ketzer in der Stadt, gratifyingly complements the first three in extending our knowledge of Waldensian life and beliefs over a broad German landscape from far West to far East, and in city as well as village and town.

The main records surrounding the trial in Strassburg had been known before Modestin went to work, but they were available only in the very inadequate edition of T.W. Röhrich of 1855. Needless to say, Röhrich failed to meet modern standards of explanatory apparatus; worse, he drew a false assumption that made him neglect important evidence contained in the records. Not only has Modestin rectified both faults but also he has located two important supplementary documents unknown to Röhrich. As a result, the count of convicted heretics has risen from six to twenty-seven, and we now know that the trial was conducted by the Strassburg Rat (town council) as opposed to any ecclesiastical inquisitorial authority. The documentation is almost entirely in an Alsatian dialect of German, easily intelligible for anyone who knows modern German (Modestin elucidates a few occasionally puzzling words).The edition comes with an exhaustively researched set of biographies of the relevant personages, and the free-standing monograph paints the larger picture.

Here I can report only a selection of Modestin’s plentiful findings. Waldensians had dwelled undisturbed in Strassburg for many decades: one woman confessed in 1400 to her conversion to the faith some fifty or sixty years earlier. Many had come to the city from considerable distances: from as far east as Regensburg and Augsburg; from Speyer and Solothurn. Some sought refuge from earlier persecutions; others migrated for economic reasons. Waldensians in Strassburg were not marginalized before the trial of 1400. Most of the men were engaged in Strassburg’s cloth industry; among them were a father and son who both held membership at times in the Rat. (The latter also had a coat of arms.) Procedures against Waldensians in nearby Bern and Freiburg im Üchtland and incendiary sermons delivered by a visiting Dominican from Basel finally drove the governing powers in Strassburg to action. Rather than allowing the bishop of Strassburg to seize the initiative by conducting an inquisitorial campaign that would embarrass the city, the Rat moved against the local Waldensians on its own. Twenty-seven of those examined were exiled from the bishopric (twenty-two for life; the others for five years), while seven persons had their trials broken off on grounds of pregnancy, youth, or “not being too smart” (Quellen, p. 146).

Modestin has no doubt that the individuals rounded up in 1400 were really Waldensians. Although the examinations were conducted on the basis of an interrogatory, this was not drawn from an inquisitor’s handbook but rather from information provided by repentant informants who were not heresiologists. Thus the error list is one of a kind and shows discrepancies from textbook verities of what Waldensians were supposed to have believed. For example, of the three “main no’s”—no lying, no oath-swearing, no purgatory—only the last appears. Nonetheless, the denial of purgatory alone is a litmus test. Moreover...