Abstract
Christianity has suffered from division and dissent from its earliest days. Issues pertaining to belief, practice, obedience, and Christian identity arose frequently. Following the official recognition of Christianity as a legitimate religion by Emperor Constantine the Great (in 313), issues of heterodox belief or condemned practice took on political overtones that extended beyond the internal divisions of local churches to the dynamics of the Church as a whole and to the larger society.1 Threats of disorder made involvement of the Roman authorities, and, later, of local rulers, almost inevitable. Theologians, commencing at least with Augustine of Hippo, began to accept the coercion of dissenters by the lay power as a necessity.2 Paradoxically, this perhaps grudging reliance on imperial authority provided the Church an impetus for convening the earliest ecumenical councils, which attempted to define the boundaries of orthodoxy. These definitions, in turn, eventually became widely accepted and formalized (one example of which is the Nicene Creed), but not without offending adherents of condemned doctrines.
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Notes
For an older, but still useful, account, see Walter Bauer, Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, ed. Robert A. Craft and Gerhard Krodel (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971).
A survey of changing early attitudes about heresy and persecution may be found in Peter Garnsey, “Religious Toleration in Classical Antiquity,” in Persecution and Toleration, ed. William J. Sheils, Studies in Church History 21 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984), 1–27.
For an overview, see Henry Chadwick, Augustine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 75–86.
Gerhart Ladner, “The Concepts of Ecclesia and Christianitas and Their Relation to the Idea of Papal plenitudo potestatis from Gregory VII to Boniface VIII,” Miscellanea historiae pontificis 18 (1954): 49–77.
Jeffrey Burton Russell, Dissent and Order in the Middle Ages: The Search for Legitimate Authority (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992), 9–20.
But see also Cary J. Nederman, Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, c. 1100–c. 1550 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000).
The collections of papal decretals used titles such as De simonia, De haereticis, De schismaticis, and De apostatis together with titles concerning Jews and Muslims. See John T. Gilchrist, “Simoniaca haeresis and the Problem of Orders from Leo IX to Gratian,” reprinted in Gilchrist, Canon Law in the Age of Reform, 11th–12th Centuries (Variorum Collected Studies Series, CS 406; Aldershot: Variorum, 1993), section IV: 209–35.
Robert I. Moore, Origins of European Dissent (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1985), 46–81, 168–239.
Alexander Patschovsky, “Heresy and Society: On the Political Function of Heresy in the Medieval World,” in Texts and the Repression of Heresy, ed. Catherine Bruschi and Peter Biller (York: York Medieval Press, 2003), 23–41;
Malcolm D. Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Bogomils to Hus (London: Edward Arnold, 1977), 169–72; and, John Arnold, “Inquisition, Texts and Discourse,” in Texts and the Repression of Heresy, ed. Bruschi and Biller, 63–80.
See also Karen Sullivan, The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). On Arnold of Brescia, see Moore, Origins of European Dissent, 115–36.
Brian Tierney, Foundations of the Conciliar Theory: The Contribution of the Medieval Canonists from Gratian to the Great Schism, rev. ed. (Leiden: Brill, 1998);
and, Michiel Decaluwe, A Successful Defeat: Eugene IV’s Struggle with the Council of Basel for Ultimate Authority in the Church, 1431–1449 (Bruxelles: Institut historique belge de Rome, 2009).
Iris Origo, The World of San Bernardino (London: Jonathan Cape, 1963), 117–30;
and, Franco Mormando, The Preacher’s Demons: Bernardino of Siena and the Social Underground of Early Renaissance Italy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). The apocalyptic tones of anti-mendicant polemics reflect serious concerns over disruption of the Church;
see Yves Congar, “Aspects ecclesiologiques de la querelle entre mendicants et séculiers dans la seconde moitié du XIIIe siècle et au début du XIVe,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge 28 (1961–2): 35–151.
Richard Kieckhefer, Magic in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989);
and, Alain Boureau, Satan the Heretic: The Birth of Demonology in the Medieval West, trans. Teresa Lavender (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006).
The primary inspiration for this trend was no doubt the 1987 publication of Robert I. Moore’s The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250 and its second edition (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007). Moore has recently developed and expanded his arguments in The War on Heresy (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Extensions of Moore’s “persecuting society” thesis may be found in volumes such as Christendom and its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution and Rebellion, 1000–1500, ed. Scott L. Waugh and Peter D. Diehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996),
and Heresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R. I. Moore, ed. Michael Frassetto (Leiden: Brill, 2006).
But see Toleranz in Mittelalter, ed. Alexander Patschovsky and Harald Zimmermann (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1998).
For an overview of the Hussite and Wycliffite movements and ideas, see Gordon Leff, Heresy in the Later Middle Ages: The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent c. 1250–c. 1450 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967).
Most academics, however, easily extricated themselves from accusations of heresy; see William J. Courtenay, “Inquiry and Inquisition: Academic Freedom in Medieval Universities,” Church History 58 (1989): 168–81.
For a comprehensive investigation, see Andrew E. Larsen, The School of Heretics: Academic Condemnation at the University of Oxford, 1277–1409, Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 40 (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
See A Companion to John Wyclif, ed. Ian Christopher Levy (Leiden: Brill, 2005);
and, Michael Wilks, Wyclif: Political Ideas and Practice, ed. Anne Hudson (Oxford: Oxbow Books, 2000).
Also useful in this regard is The Culture of Inquisition in Medieval England, Westfield Medieval Studies, ed. Mary C. Flannery and Katie L. Walter (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013).
See, for example, the many accusations of Lollardy leveled against Margery Kempe (c. 1373–1438), recorded in The Book of Margery Kempe, ed. Lynn Staley, TEAMS (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 1996).
More broadly, see J. Patrick Hornbeck II, “Love and Marriage in the Norwich Heresy Trials, 1428–1431,” Viator: Medieval and Renaissance Studies 44 no. 3 (2013): 237–56.
See now Thomas A. Fudge, The Trial of Jan Hus: Medieval Heresy and Criminal Procedure (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
The still-standard account is Marjorie Reeves, The Influence of Prophecy in the Later Middle Ages: A Study in Joachimism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969).
An excellent recent study of Ockham in the context of the Franciscan debates is Jonathan Robinson, William of Ockham’s Early Theory of Property in Context (Leiden: Brill, 2013).
Umberto Eco, Il nome della rosa (Milan: Bompiani, 1980).
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© 2014 Karen Bollermann, Thomas M. Izbicki, and Cary J. Nederman
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Bollermann, K., Izbicki, T.M., Nederman, C.J. (2014). Introduction. In: Bollermann, K., Izbicki, T.M., Nederman, C.J. (eds) Religion, Power, and Resistance from the Eleventh to the Sixteenth Centuries. The New Middle Ages. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137431059_1
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