Truth and the Heretic: Crises of Knowledge in Medieval French Literature (review)

In Truth and the Heretic, Karen Sullivan sheds much light on the process of constructing medieval heresy as a social threat. On the basis of a wide selection of historical records and literary texts, she persuasively argues that the heterodox believer was perceived as destabilizing the status of truth, certainty, authority, law, testimony, and evidence in Christian society. She juxtaposes competitive portrayals of heresy in didactic and literary writings to suggest that literature could express the truths about religious and social dissidence that were inaccessible elsewhere.

The book draws its strength from associating heterodoxy with the epistemological anxieties of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The need to re-establish or revisit truth as a religious, social, and linguistic category lies at the heart of a large body of contemporary didactic, polemical, courtly, and popular works. As Sullivan demonstrates, the secretive and duplicitous heretics, concealing their errors with lies and ambiguities, left their imprint on much Catholic writing, troubadour lyric, Arthurian romance, and comic tale. Because the Cathars and the Waldensians defied their orthodox adversaries through secrecy and dissimulation, and while they denied and circumvented accusations of heresy, persecution of religious dissidence was hampered by a need to redefine what constituted evidence of error and what served as a basis for condemnation. Literature did not remain indifferent to the epistemological challenges posed by groups embracing heterodox interpretations of Christianity. Sullivan justly relates this negotiation of evidence in clerical writings to the celebration of ambiguity and indeterminacy as a source of pleasure in literary works.

However, while it is compelling for both historical and literary analysis to position heresy within the contemporary debate about the nature of truth, I think that the author misjudges how the two phenomena are related in suggesting that the appearance of heresy brought about the epistemological crisis recorded in didactic and fictional literature. It may be more accurate to perceive heresy (whether real or constructed) as itself produced by the crisis that underlay other large-scale intellectual and social developments we observe in the twelfth century (such as the Gregorian reforms). The heterodox Christian was without doubt a dangerous figure for Catholic authors, but orthodoxy and truth were at that time intensely tested and reshaped also within the Church.

Similarly, Sullivan's reading of marginalized and subversive characters in literary works loses its momentum when it looks too hard for encoded references to heresy. These deviant characters are multi-faceted figures, and if one sees a reflection of the heretic in them, this perhaps evinces less directly an embedded commentary on the religious persecution of the Cathars and the Waldensians than it does an aspiration of vernacular writers to write outside of the clerical canon. By interpreting the impact of heterodoxy on literary imagination in isolation from other concerns of courtly and popular authors, the book concludes, I believe unconvincingly, that literature affirmed and celebrated heresy. Just as criticism of the Inquisition should be carefully separated from claims of heresy (and Sullivan's otherwise insightful discussion of troubadour lyric is in my view weakened by following this path), so the interest of texts in the instability of social truths should only very cautiously be read as an affirmation of deviance.

Despite this tendency to channel broader questions into the single problem of heresy, Sullivan's exploration of heresy as an interpretative challenge is a remarkable and much-needed study. It speaks to multiple audiences, and it speaks beautifully to them. Karen Sullivan has to be commended for producing not only an illuminating and provocative, but also a pleasurable, book on the difficult topic of religious persecution.