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  • Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations by L. J. Sackville
  • Tomas Zahora
Sackville, L. J. , Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations (Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages), Woodbridge and Rochester, York Medieval Press, 2011; hardback; pp. 240; R.R.P. £50.00; ISBN 9781903153369.

The intensity with which historians have tackled medieval heresy has resulted in an impressive accumulation of literature. It has also produced, as Lucy Sackville points out, a range of occasionally irreconcilable interpretations: some historians seek to find evidence of actual heretical practices, while other interpret the phenomenon as almost entirely constructed by clerical discourse. Sackville's Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth century is a response to this historiographical problem. Rather than looking for the outlines of actual heretical practice, or discounting the clerics' rhetorical strategies as insignificant, Sackville endeavours to 'access the contemporary idea of what heresy was' (p. 9).

At the core of Sackville's book is an impressive range of mostly thirteenth-century texts divided into four chapter-length categories - polemical, edificatory, canon-legal, and inquisitorial - followed by a chapter synthesising her observations on the idea of heresy. Sackville approaches each thematic cluster by first describing select sources and then extracting from them the different aspects of the idea of heresy. The intuitive, well-organised structuring of the material, much of which is available in edited versions, makes Heresy and Heretics a valuable survey of sources often ignored by scholars. In her analysis, Sackville, whose work is influenced by Peter Biller, convincingly illustrates that most thirteenth-century texts assume that heretics are literate, that their literacy can subvert the efforts of orthodoxy, and that they must be fought by literate clergy using literate means.

Thirteenth-century Northern Italian polemics in particular assume a common ground between orthodox and deviant Christianity, and treat heresy as doctrinal error. Yet the sides are not equal. While orthodoxy is portrayed as united in its fight against error, heretics themselves are seen as splintered into disorganised groups. Even edifying texts, as Sackville shows, are not free from polemic. The shadowy figure of the deceptive heretic is a recurrent theme, a foil around which writers built morally stimulating exempla and constructed rhetorical demonstrations of orthodoxy. The Dominicans found in heretics an essential agent of defining their own legitimacy and identity.

Canonistic literature, as Sackville reveals, offers another perspective. On one hand, the Fourth Lateran Council is an important indicator of the move to gather heresies under one category of condemned beliefs and practices in opposition to an increasingly better-defined orthodoxy. Local councils, however, showed little interest in analysing abstract heretical beliefs, and focused on ways of identifying and declaring culpable movements and persons. This tendency is confirmed by inquisitorial material instructing practitioners [End Page 229] to determine levels of error, guilt, and association. Figurative descriptions of heretics also undergo change: the stability of the metaphor of the fox is only seeming, and so are the descriptions of heretics as duplicitous and corrupt.

The sheer scale of material covered and its detailed analysis constitute a significant contribution to medieval scholarship. Another contribution lies in Sackville's engagement with a fundamental historiographical challenge. Although she does not intend to write about actual heretical beliefs and practice, her exploration of the idea - or rather ideas - of heresy in the thirteenth century nevertheless outlines the scaffold of something suggesting exactly such underlying 'reality' of heresy. Thus in polemics, for instance, 'heresy is presented as learned because that was the guise in which it was encountered - that the polemicists were in contact with the wider "textual community" of their local heretics and that this encounter, whether written or oral, is as much a part of the source material as the anti-heretical tradition' (p. 40). The straightforward way of reading this observation is to acknowledge that the construction of heresy is the result of a dialectic between perceived heretical practice and the agendas of writers of anti-heretical tracts. But the tacit distinction between the rhetoric of medieval documents and the reality of heretical lives (e.g., p. 169) assumes a dichotomy between the heretic as a figure of flesh and blood...

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