Per hoc a peccatis recederent et bonum appeterent

It is a standard rhetorical trope, even in the polemical texts, and certainly in much of the legal material, to couple the coercive repression of heresy with a positive movement to reinforce Catholic teachings through word and example. Of the texts that talk about heresy in the mid thirteenth century a significant number are the product of that impulse: the impulse to correct and instruct, to edify and pre-empt that was part of the preaching revival of the thirteenth century. That drive by the papacy to improve the preaching offered by the Catholic church, and to control the right to preach more carefully, can be understood as in part motivated by heresy.

The landscape at the turn of the century featured heretical and other ‘pseudo-preachers’ as well as those sanctioned by the church, and preaching was a significant part of those group identities, central to the ideal of the apostolic life promoted by church and espoused by heretics and others. Although towards the middle of the century the church had won the centre ground, it had not secured it, and preaching and the correct enactment of the vita apostolica remained a tool in ‘the race between the institutional church and its rivals’ to control lay piety. Whether this was to be achieved through the repression of heresy by specifically anti-heretical preaching or through the promotion of an orthodoxy informed by heterodox challenges, it depended on the increased manpower and expertise offered by the mendicant orders and on the production and proliferation of new texts developed to support preaching, a ‘rhetorical system of ars praedicandi’.