This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.
First major survey of the German inquisitor Petrus Zwicker, one of the most significant figures in the repression of heresy. In the final years of the fourteenth century, waves of persecution shattered German-speaking Waldensian communities, with the scale of inquisitions matching or even greater than the better-known trials in southern France. In the middle of the persecution was the influential and enigmatic figure of the Celestine provincial and inquisitor of heresy, Petrus Zwicker (d.after 1404). His surviving texts and inquisition protocols offer a fresh, intriguing picture of the medieval repression of heresy. Zwicker was an accurate and intelligent interrogator with direct access to the Waldensians' sources and knowledge. But although he is one of the most effective inquisitors of the MiddleAges, he was even more important as the author of anti-heretical texts. His Cum dormirent homines became a standard work on Waldensianism in the fifteenth century (and this study attributes another anti-heretical treatise, the Refutatio errorum, to him). With his unique biblicist and pastoral style, Zwicker struck the right note at a moment when the Church was in crisis. His texts spread rapidly, they were preached to the people and translated into German, and helped to build the fear of heresy, anti-clericalism and disobedience in the years of the Great Western Schism. This book is the first full-length study on Zwicker and his significance to the history of heresy and its repression. It offers a meticulous analysis of the sources left by him and teases out new, ground-breaking discoveries from careful examination of previously poorly known manuscripts. Dr REIMA VALIMAKI isa postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Cultural History, University of Turku
Heresy and Citizenship examines the anti-heretical campaigns in late-medieval Augsburg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Strasbourg, and other cities. By focusing on the unprecedented period of persecution between 1390 and 1404, this study demonstrates how heretical presence in cities was exploited in ecclesiastical, political, and social conflicts between the cities and their external rivals, and between urban elites. These anti-heretical campaigns targeted Waldensians who believed in lay preaching and simplified forms of Christian worship. Groups of individuals identified as Waldensians underwent public penance, execution, or expulsion. In each case, the course and outcome of inquisitions reveal tensions between institutions within each city, most often between city councils and local bishops or archbishops. In such cases, competing sides used the persecution of heresy to assert their authority over others. As a result, persecution of urban Waldensians acquired meaning beyond mere correction of religious error. By placing the anti-heretical campaigns of this period in their socio-political and religious context, Heresy and Citizenship also engages with studies of social and political conflict in late medieval towns. It examines the role the exclusion of religiously and socially deviant groups played in the development of urban governments, and the rise of ideologies of good citizenship and the common good. It will be of interest to scholars and students interested in medieval urban and religious history, and the history of heresy and its persecution.
For the third edition, this comprehensive history of the great heretical movements of the Middle Ages has been updated to take account of recent research in the field.
The essays in this book provide new insights into the history of heresy and the formation of the persecuting society in the Middle Ages and explores the shifting understanding of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in medieval and modern times.
Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern Europe theological uniformity was synonymous with social cohesion in societies that regarded themselves as bound together at their most fundamental levels by a religion. To maintain a belief in opposition to the orthodoxy was to set oneself in opposition not merely to church and state but to a whole culture in all of its manifestations. From the eleventh century to the fifteenth, however, dissenting movements appeared with greater frequency, attracted more followers, acquired philosophical as well as theological dimensions, and occupied more and more the time and the minds of religious and civil authorities. In the perception of dissent and in the steps taken to deal with it lies the history of medieval heresy and the force it exerted on religious, social, and political communities long after the Middle Ages. In this volume, Edward Peters makes available the most compact and wide-ranging collection of source materials in translation on medieval orthodoxy and heterodoxy in social context.
This concise and balanced survey of heresy and inquisition in the Middle Ages examines the dynamic interplay between competing medieval notions of Christian observance, tracing the escalating confrontations between piety, reform, dissent, and Church authority between 1100 and 1500. Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane explores the diverse regional and cultural settings in which key disputes over scripture, sacraments, and spiritual hierarchies erupted, events increasingly shaped by new ecclesiastical ideas and inquisitorial procedures. Incorporating recent research and debates in the field, her analysis brings to life a compelling issue that profoundly influenced the medieval world.
The Poor of Lyons, whom their detractors called 'Waldensians' - after the name of their founder Waldo (or Vaudès) - first emerged around 1170 and formed in common with other groups of the period a sect which embraced evangelism, prophecy and poverty. By challenging their prohibition by the lay clergy, and by following the Scripture to the last letter, they suffered excommunication and were condemned as heretics. Forced underground and dispersed widely, they nevertheless managed to maintain contact across Europe, through an established network of itinerant preachers, in Provence and Dauphiné, Calabria and Piedmont, Austria and Bohemia, Pomerania, Brandenburg, Silesia and beyond. The Poor of Lyons constituted the only medieval heresy to have survived to the dawn of the so-called 'modern' period. Their tale of simple devotion mixed with a fierce tenacity serves to illuminate aspects of religious belief that have persisted to the present day. This book was first published in 1999.
