Inquisition and Knowledge, 1200–1700, ed. Peter Biller and L.J. Sackville

Abstract

This volume aims to explore knowledge of heresy and inquisition in the medieval period and ‘knowledge [of it] through editions and empirical historical research’ in the early modern era. The period 1200–1700 allows an examination of contemporaneous knowledge of medieval heresy and inquisition, as well as a study of polemical descriptions and uses of heresy and inquisition in the wake of the Reformation. The book contains thirteen chapters that survey a commendable selection of topics, plus a lucid and instructive introduction by the editors, Peter Biller and L.J. Sackville. Conspicuously, and consciously, the perennial questions over the existence, or extent, of ‘Catharism’ are mostly absent. The volume is stronger for this decision, and the varied assortment of historical inquiries into knowledge of heresy that are pursued demonstrates the benefits of this choice: topics discussed include the relationship between schism and heresy, and Greeks and heretics, in the minds of Latin theologians and canonists (Irene Bueno, ch. 5), the production of ‘user-friendly’ handbooks of persuasion against heretical thought for use with the laity (Adam Poznański, ch. 7), and the ‘authentic voices’ of young women interrogated about their relationship with a community of ‘cowled nuns’ in early fourteenth-century Lower Silesia (Paweł Kras, ch. 4).