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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
In general modern writers on popular heresy in the high middle ages have shared the opinion of contemporary observers that the capacity of dissident preachers to attract a popular following, stimulate sentiments of intense devotion and loyalty, and canalise resentment of clerical exaction and abuse, constituted a significant threat to the authority of the Church. Hence, more or less explicitly, the extension of the theory and practice of coercion in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries has been seen as a defensive reaction designed (with the emphasis according to the preference of the historian) to protect clerical privilege and spiritual authority. There are, however, distinguished exceptions. In one of the few passages in his writings where religious persecution is discussed, Southern accounts for it thus:
… those who bore authority in the church were agents with very limited powers of initiative. They were not free agents. Doubtless they were responsible for some terrible acts of violence and cruelty, among which the Albigensian Crusade holds a particular horror. But on the whole the holders of ecclesiastical authority were less prone to violence, even against unbelievers, than the people whom they ruled.
1 Southern, R. W., Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (Harmondsworth 1970) p 19.Google Scholar
2 Hamilton, Bernard, The Medieval Inquisition (London 1981) pp 25, 33, 57.Google Scholar
3 Except for direct quotations, references to sources translated in Moore, R. I., The Birth of Popular Heresy (London 1975 Google Scholar) and to discussion in Moore, R. I., The Origins of European Dissent (London 1977) are not given hereGoogle Scholar.
4 Bouquet 10 p 23.
5 Senior, Landulf, Historia Mediolanensis II, MGH SS 8 pp 65–6 Google Scholar. Hamilton p 25, mistakenly attributes this action to ‘the people’.
6 Historia Rerum Anglicarum 2 p xiii: Chronicles of the Reigns of Stephen etc., ed R. Howlett (RS 1885) 2 p 133.
7 Chronica Regia Coloniensis, MGH SRG 18 p 114.
8 Gesta synodi Aurelianensis, Bouquet 10 p 539.
9 Bautier, R-H, ‘L’hérésie d’Orléans et le mouvement intellectuel au début du xie.siècle. Documents et hypothèses.’ 95eGoogle Scholar. Congrès des Sociétés savantes, Reims 1970,Section philologique et historique (1975) 1 pp 63–88.
10 Henri de Marcy in PL 204 cols 235–40. J. H. Mundy, Liberty and Political Power in Toulouse, 1050–1230 (New York 1954) pp 53–62; ‘Noblesse et hérésie. Une famille cathare: les Maurand’, Annates 29.5 (1974) pp 1211–4.
11 Tractatus contra Petrobusianos ed. James Fearns, CC Continuatio Mediaeualis 10 (1968) p 5.
12 Conant, K. J., Carolingian and Romanesque Architecture (Harmondsworth 1974 edn) p 253.Google Scholar
13 Chron. S. Andreae Cameracensium, MCH SS 7 p 540.
14 PL 156 cols 952–3.
15 Annales Rodenses, MGH SS 16 p 711.
16 PL 179 cols 937–8.
17 PL 182 col 677.
18 Serm. in cantica lxvi, PL 183, col 1100.
19 Moore, Origins of European Dissent pp 258—9.
20 PL 182 col 677.
21 Brown, P. R. L., ‘Society and the Supernatural: a Medieval Change’, Daedalus 104 (1975) 133–51 Google Scholar, now in Brown, P. R. L., Society and the Holy in Late Antiquity (London 1982) pp 302–332 Google Scholar. Even if the remarkable characterisation of ‘Superstition and Science: Nature, Fortune and the Passing of the Medieval Ordeal’ proposed by Radding, Charles M., AHR 84 (1979) pp 945–969 Google Scholar, were plausible in itself it would not invalidate the suggestion of tension between the two forms ofjustice postulated by Brown and above.
22 I owe this point to Dr. Janet Nelson.
23 Historia Viziliacensis Monasterii, Bouquet 12 pp 343–4.