Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe (review)

Abstract

Heresy in Transition: Transforming Ideas of Heresy in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Edited by Ian Hunter, John Christian Laursen, and Gary J. Nederman. [Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700.] Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing Company. 2005. Pp. xii, 205. $99.95.) Ideas of heresy are indeed in transition, not only across chronological span indicated in title of this stimulating collection of essays, but also within modern academy. Intellectual and temporal divisions once considered self-evident (such as boundary between heresy and orthodoxy, or between medieval and early modern) are disintegrating under new approaches and analyses. Particularly irksome to scholars in recent years has been traditional emphasis on disjuncture between Catholic medieval and Protestant early modern, a division which has artificially severed important continuities and unhelpfully polarized an otherwise diverse spectrum of reform, religiosity, and repression. According to editors of this volume, crucial transformations that unfolded between years 1300 and 1700 demand sustained diachronic attention, challenging the scholarly imagination to recover medieval understandings of heresy and then to chart their transformation during early modern period. By tracking single potent concept of heresy across hitherto divided centuries and confessions, contributors offer an important new perspective on a vital subject. This is not a book about heretics: its subject is instead those who thought about heresy, and how their ideas changed over time. As lively discussions continue over ethics (or even possibility) of finding heretics in past, essays here both sidestep and contribute to debate by charting historical foundations of such scholarship itself. Imitating its object, volume is organized to straddle transition between medieval and early modern constructions of heresy. The thirteen essays proceed with disciplined regularity across Middle Ages and sixteenth century up through Enlightenment, in many cases overlapping in productive and provocative ways. This chronological organization allows thematic shifts and their implications to emerge gradually: first, constructions of heresy up through fifteenth century (Paul Antony Hayward, Sabina Flanagan,Takashi Shogimen, Cary Nederman); second, uses of heresy as an intellectual tool or productive concept (Constant Mews, Thomas Fudge, Craig D'Alton, Conal Condren); and third, reception and reconstructions of heresy in early modern historiography (Thomas Ahnert, John Christian Laursen, Ian Hunter, Gisela Schluter, Sandra Pott). …