Medieval heresy: popular movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (review)

Abstract

Short notices 307 I especially enjoyed 'St John on Pattnos' and 'Moses and the burning bush', complete with Yahweh as a cat, and the delightful domestic scene 'Attending at a birth'. There is no text in this book apart from a witty onepage preface which reports the 'sensational discovery' by a group of workmen in 1991 of the paintings. This postmodern jokiness, familiar to all through Umberto Eco's The name ofthe rose and sundry other works, has not yet lost its charm. The astounding conclusion reached, 'that some of the greatest masterpieces of miniature painting and illumination hadfirstbeen sketched with cats as stand-ins for the characters in thefinalpaintings . . . [leading] to a complete reassessment of the role of the cat in medieval life' (p. 5) has one chuckling. For cat lovers of all ages. Carole Cusack School of Studies in Religion University of Sydney Lambert, Malcolm, Medieval heresy: popular movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, Oxford and Cambridge Mass., Blackwell, 1992; 2nd ed. paper; pp. xv, 449, 12 maps, 11 illustrations; R.R.P. AUS$49.95. Malcolm Lambertfirstpublished his survey of medieval heresy in 1977. This second edition is still the best guide to all the many varieties of heterodox belief in the Middle Ages. Once more Lambert summarizes scholarship, from the very old to the very new, not only in the Anglophone world but also in countries as obvious as France and as neglected as Croatia. In his long, but never gratuitous, footnotes he gives succindy what he thinks is the good and the bad of almost two hundred years of research into unorthodoxy and persecution. H e also takes account of the importance that anthropology and other disciplines have had on how we now view medieval heretics. This was far from obvious fifteen years ago. The bibliography, though idiosyncratic and somewhat limited, remains the most convenient starting point for student and teacher alike if coming to the study of medieval heresy for thefirsttime. Lambert now begins his survey with the elevendi-century heretics at Orleans, running through the Cathars and Waldensians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,toend with the Lollards and the Hussites of the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries. He has also narrowed his geographic vision to 308 Short notices concentrate more on western and central Europe rather dian on the lands of the Byzantine empire. The dualist Bogomil heresy of die Balkans no longer has a chapter to itself and is only mentioned in relation to the dualist Cathar heresy of northern Italy and southern France. Nevertheless, the second edition, like the first, still has an odd intellectualist and somewhat aliistorical feel to it. Lambert does assume, and he is not alone in this, diat if two heresies look die same, such as the Bogomils and the Cathars,tiiensome connection must have existed between them. Indeed, one dualist idea must have caused the other. Some Cathars do seem to have possessed certain Bogomil texts but it is necessary to determine what caused medieval men and women to consider something like the Bogomil Vision of Isaiah to have relevance for diem. The question is not whether a community can understand unordiodox ideas. Almost any group of individuals can do that. It is why some men and women adopt heretical notions despite coercion or torture whereas other individuals, right next door, do not. Lambert now stresses the importance of specific economic, political, and social rhythms in understanding medieval heresy. This must owe something to the work of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie or Robert Moore. But it is more lip-service than conviction. Throughout die booktiiereis still an assumption that heretical ideas drift over the landscape of Europe affecting individuals regardless of the centuries or die communities in which they live. As a consequence, an institution such as die Inquisition and its role in identifying heretics is never seriously considered. The historical specificity of why one would be a heretic in either the eleventh or fourteenth centuries is not addressed by Lambert, except in a rather romantic appeal to the inner nature of humans and our yearning for die spiritual. By intellectualizing heresy, and therefore the study of it, one never has to think, except...