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The article presents a revised dating of a major late medieval inquisition of heresy, challenging the dating of the records established since the 1880s. The inquisitor Petrus Zwicker’s proceedings against Brandenburgian and Pomeranian Waldensians in Stettin did not take place between November 1392 and March 1394, with an 11-month pause between March 1393 and February 1394, as has been the scholarly consensus up till now. Instead, the prosecution was a continuous process that started in November 1393 and lasted till late March 1394. The article discusses the problems of the established dating that is based on now-outdated information about the inquisitor’s itinerary and an ambiguous 15th-century commentary on the register volume. The internal evidence of the register, such as the way different deponents refer to the same events, strongly points towards an uninterrupted process. The revised timeline for the inquisitions solves several contradictions in interpreting the records and proposes new lines of inquiry. A novel reconstruction of the last Waldensian minister’s visit to Stettin and surroundings is provided in the last section of the article. In general, the article addresses the constant need to re-evaluate established interpretations of premodern sources, including those uncontested in the scholarship.
The chapter takes stock of the major trends in recent scholarship of medieval heresy and ecclesiastical repression, identifies promising research avenues, and provides an overview of the way in which the papacy confronted the perceived menace of heresy in the central Middle Ages, considering the representations of and responses to religious dissent displayed by the official Church alongside its own motifs and transformations. The implementation of anti-heresy measures are thus observed in light of the main historical developments of the papacy in the central centuries of the Middle Ages: the eleventh-century reform and its institutional legacy; the zenith of papal monarchy; and the Avignon papacy and its political and intellectual developments. In all these different contexts, variously permeated by the ideal of papal theocracy, the Holy See fashioned apt legal and theological responses intended to contain what was featured as an enduring peril threatening the Church and Christendom.
Emilio Comba, a leading Waldensian historian in the nineteenth century, was a strong advocate for nation-building in post-unification Italy. This article examines the relationship between Comba's “making Italians” endeavors and his historical writings, focusing mainly on his appropriation of the preceding confessional framework. As a fervent nationalist and evangelical pastor, Comba believed that true Risorgimento required not only political independence but also a religious reform of the Italian nation that would restore Italians to the original Religion of Christ. He envisioned this national reform as a realization of both liberty and the Gospel within the universal history of the Christian religion. Comba employed historical writings to support his claims, attempting to demonstrate how Italy was a perennially Protestant nation on the one hand and to serve as a magistra vitae for fellow citizens on the other. This article argues that Comba relied on a genealogical narrative structure inherited from the early modern protestant historiography in presenting his national history. By recasting its composition according to a category of the nation, he transformed a confessional genealogy of the true church into a national one. From a broader perspective, this article calls for further reflection on the role that the early modern intellectual framework played in the process of modern nation-building.
Edited by
Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut,T. M. Lemos, Huron University College, University of Western Ontario,Tristan S. Taylor, University of New England, Australia
General editor
Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut
In 1208 Pope Innocent III proclaimed a crusade of “extermination” and “expurgation” against the heretics supposedly infesting the lands of the count of Toulouse. What is now known as the “Albigensian Crusade” lasted twenty-one years and was the first holy war in which Christians were guaranteed salvation by killing other Christians. The massacres during the crusade, especially at Béziers in 1209, were “genocidal moments.” The victims, though, were neither an ethnic, national, or racial group. The victims were arguably a regional or possibly a cultural group, but such groups are not covered by the modern legal definition of genocide. Nevertheless, they were deliberately targeted for destruction. Despite accusations of heresy, the victims were not initially a self-consciously different religious group either. Crucially, they were not “Cathars,” which is what most medieval historians and genocide scholars assume the victims to have been. “Catharism” as a medieval heresy never existed; it was an invention of nineteenth-century scholars trying to understand the Albigensian crusade more “scientifically” and less confessionally. Finally, were the individual testimonies collected by the first inquisitions into heretical depravity, established in Toulouse in the aftermath of the Albigensian crusade, analogous to the memories of individuals who witnessed or survived genocides collected by modern tribunals?
This chapter discusses the principal archaeological remains, namely the large numbers of manuscript books which contain the church's views of the topic. It also shows how these groups were fashioned and reshaped in these texts. During the twelfth century the texts proliferate. They combine the older language and themes with the notion that there were new heretics and heresies, and some contain the direct description or refutation of a specific new heresy. During the thirteenth century there is amplification, for example the 1184 decretal forms part of the section on heresy in Gregory IX's Five Books of the Decretals. The chapter explains a more direct description of the two major heresies of the period, those of the Cathars and the Waldensians, while continuing to use the church's vocabulary. The chapter relies on these texts to access the two major heretical movements of the High Middle Ages, and finally provides comment on the main distortions of these texts.
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