Order and Exclusion: Cluny and Christendom Face Heresy, Judaism and Islam, 1000-1150 (review)

Dominique Iogna-Prat's powerful and disturbing analysis of the language of intolerance built into the Cluniac view of world order has been made available to an English language readership by Graham Robert Edwards' near flawless translation. Order and Exclusion builds on the historiography of medieval intolerance and persecution during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. The book offers the reader a disquieting picture of Peter the Venerable's role in shaping a Latin Christendom in which marginalisation was not only ratified, but essential. Iogna-Prat has taken a microhistorical approach to the subject, and has shown very clearly how careful analysis of the world of Cluny can help us to comprehend the world of Latin Christendom during and after the Gregorian reforms. This is an important and instructive book.

The first section, 'The Monks and the World Order', sets up the broad context of the book, giving the reader a detailed and comprehensive history of medieval and Christian notions of social order. Here Iogna-Prat briefly outlines various theories of community that underpinned early Christian articulations of the Christian group, contrasting those with seemingly contradictory monastic desires to absent individuals from the world. He soon moves to Cluny, however, arguing that the Gregorian dream of a society regulated by clerics was achieved in Cluny's ability to intervene in the lives of both monks and lay people. Cluny's ecclesiology described the monastery as a Church within the Church; in this way, the structural and indeed ideological premises on which Cluniac monasticism was founded were more perhaps more akin to principles of inclusion than of exclusion.

Yet Iogna-Prat is concerned to apprehend the logic of a world in which 'persecution and demonization of the other could become a structural necessity for Christian society' (p. 23). This he does by focussing on the works of Peter the Venerable. A number of years ago, R. I. Moore also described the period during and after the Gregorian reforms as pivotal in the formation of a persecuting society. Moore showed convincingly that in order to establish a community of the faithful, Christendom needed to establish a community of the unfaithful. This, he argued, gave meaning to the idea of western Christendom and allowed spontaneous and systematic persecution of various minority groups from the 11^th century. Iogna-Prat's painstaking analysis of Peter the Venerable's tract Contra Petrobrusianos adds much to Moore's more sweeping argument.

The second section of this book exposes what Iogna-Prat calls Peter the Venerable's 'sociology of Christendom' (p. 254), an ecclesiology constructed in the language of rhetoric, and in particular, anti-heretical polemic. Here, Iogna-Prat successfully shows that Peter the Venerable's response to the specific heresies of the Petrobrusians (denial of infant baptism; denial that some spaces, like churches, are more sacred than others; rejection of the Eucharist; rejection of the veneration of the crucifix; rejection of prayers and offerings for the dead) rested on a belief that these heresies essentially rejected the sacrifice of Christ. Christian society and the universal Church, according to Peter the Venerable, identified with each other on the basis of solidarity and ineffable spiritual bonds. These bonds were created and expressed through participation in the Eucharist, rituals of inclusion like baptism and so on. The Church 'which saw itself as an island within territory still subject to the devil's power' (p. 261), argues Iogna-Prat, was to call upon this solidarity more and more as its own quest for identity, expansion and universality brought it into conflict with groups who were different.

The third section of the book explores Peter the Venerable's ecclesiology in relation to Jews and Muslims in three works, Adversus Iudeos, Summa haeresis Sarracenorum and Contra sectam Sarracenorum. It is here that the vitriol at the heart of Peter...