Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade in Occitania, 1145-1229: Preaching in the Lord's Vineyard (review)

Abstract

Cistercians, Heresy and Crusade in Occitania, 1145-1229: Preaching in the Vineyard. By Beverly Mayne Kienzle. (Rochester, New York: York Medieval Press, Boydell and Brewer. 2001. Pp. xix, 256. $75.00.) With this monograph Beverly Mayne Kienzle has opened up an extremely important line of inquiry concerning the history of persecution, preaching, and the cultural construction of heresy and dissidence leading up to the campaigns of the Albigensian Crusade (1209-1229). Kienzle analyzes the composition and preaching of sermons against heresy delivered in Occitania from 1145 to 1229 by Cistercian monks. Although only five sermon texts from the Cistercian antiheretical campaigns survive, Kienzle does much to fill in the textual lacunae she faces by examining chronicles, letters (which she argues vigorously and provocatively could have been read aloud as sermons), treatises, statutes, exampla, and other texts (p. 10). Kienzle employs a twofold methodology to these sovirces that entails both reconstructing the preaching of individual Cistercians and collaborative campaigns; and deconstructing the rhetoric of the same preaching to reveal the strategies that the monks utilized against their adversaries (p. 202). She is very good at contextualizing the Cistercian anti-heretical perspective, particularly in her detailed examination of the twelfth-century monastic milieu for preaching that drew monks out of their cloisters and into public places like the schools of Paris. In 1145 Bernard of Clairvaux set a new course for the Cistercian Order by undertaking a preaching mission against heretical groups in southern France. He compared his public work outside the monastery walls to preaching in the Lord's Vineyard, which was a necessary extension of preaching in the domestic vineyard, that of the cloister. Kienzle borrows this metaphor throughout her study as she analyzes the tensions surrounding the role of Cistercian monks in the world. As much as the sources allow, she traces the style and content of the sermons preached by Bernard and his successors in the south: Henry of Clairvaux, Arnaud Amaury, Guy of les Vaux-des-Cernay, Fulk of Toulouse, and the less well-known trouvere turned monk Helinand of Froidmont. Kienzle uncovers a storehouse of imagery culled from the Old and New Testament alike from which Cistercian preachers constructed an evolving image of dissidence that was ultimately persecuted as heresy. As the author carefully demonstrates, heretics were described by common typologies as the defiling animals that destroy crops such as foxes, serpents, dogs, and moths; or as ravaging wolves in sheep's clothing, or more bluntly, as dissidents who heed deceitful spirits and doctrines of demons whose infection spreads like gangrene . …