Processus Bernardi Delitiosi: The Trial of Fr. Bernard Délicieux, 3 September-8 December 1319 by Alan Friedlander.

Abstract

Processus Bernardi Delitiosi: The Trial of Fr. Bernard Delicieux, 3 September-8 December 1319. By Alan Friedlander. [Transactions of the American Philosophical Society,Vol. 86, Pt. 1.] (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society. 1996. Pp. xii, 393. $30.00.) Prominent in modern accounts of late Languedocian Catharism are the activities of two wandering Cathar perfects, Guillaume Pages and Bernard Costa, attested in depositions which now survive in a seventeenth-century copy, MS Paris BN Doat 26. In 1319 a Franciscan expressed skepticism about the truth of these depositions and the real existence of the two perfects: in his way, attempting what Robert Lerner achieved on a broader scale in his 'Heresy' of the Free Spirit' (1973), where a sect which had been prominent until then in histories of heresy was demonstrated to be a fabrication based on leading questions, torture, and confessing personalities. The Franciscan was Bernard Delicieux, and he was giving witness during a trial in which he faced four charges: (1) impeding the inquisition, (2) plotting an insurrection against the king of France, (3) plotting the death of the Dominican Pope Benedict XI, and (4) supporting the Spiritual Franciscans.The documents of this trial have now been carefully edited by Alan Friedlander, who has also supplied an historical introduction, an appendix of biographical notes on persons mentioned in the trial, and a glossary providing modern identifications of Latin place-names.Testimony to Friedlander's useful edition is that it immediately suggests the need for further publications. First of all, Friedlander introduces what is at the front of the stage in this edition, the proceedings, the texts, and the outlines of Delicieux's life; he has no room to do more. For one intelligible context of Delicieux's attack on Dominican inquisitors, earlier southern French Franciscan and Dominican hostility; for a setting of Delicieux within the context of his order; for an account of Delicieux's curial friends; for the strange lapse of fifteen years between the (alleged) commission of charges 1-3 and the trial: for these the reader must still turn to earlier accounts of Delicieux, such as Yves Dossat's in Cahiers de Fanjeaux, 10 (1975). For further consideration of Arnold of Villanova, to whom Delicieux was alleged to have supplied substances with which to murder Pope Benedict XI, the reader must turn to those who have studied Arnold as a physician (Michael McVaugh) or Arnold as Spiritual Franciscan sympathizer (Robert Lerner). Clearly the time is now ripe for a major monograph on Delicieux, preferably written by Friedlander. …