Festschrifts chiefly comprised of the honoree's students demand attention to generational change. Indeed, Richard Kieckhefer's affectionate portrait of Robert E. Lerner, which opens the volume, observes that Lerner has “always had a strong sense of academic lineage,” his place, and thence that of his students, in an ancestry of scholars (xi). The editors of the volume embrace that lineage, outlining a “‘Lernerian’ approach to late medieval heresy” in their work and in the broader field (2). This approach means a periodization that “takes the late medieval period on its own terms” (5); a related awareness of that period's vibrancy and continuity with earlier phenomena; insistence upon the new, particularly via manuscript discoveries; and the recognition of the “elusive but real intellectual lineages connecting people and texts” (7).
Sean Field's opening essay argues that the Templars’ trial was King Philip IV's ambitious attempt at a state inquisition, anticipating by two centuries the later creation of the Spanish Inquisition. Field importantly notes how the various (energetic or lackadaisical) responses of Dominican inquisitors in different regions to Philip's call influenced its success. Although their topics differ widely, we might group Field's piece with that of Deeana Copeland Klepper, which presents the Speculum clericorum, a pastoral manual by Augustinian Albert of Diessen. Citing R. I. Moore's thesis of a persecuting society, Klepper's essay “re-examines the notion that medieval heresy was fundamentally linked with Judaism and Islam” (138). Albert was inattentive to Muslims and heretics in his manual, focusing on Jews as most likely to be encountered by his clerical audience in southern Germany. Yet Moore's thesis does not imply that every medieval text on heretics, Jews, or Muslims would equally treat the other two members of the trifecta; Albert's strategy does not surprise. Likewise, Samantha Kelly's fascinating piece argues that while miaphysite Ethiopian Orthodoxy was technically heretical to Latin Christians, attitudes toward it depended tactically upon other, greater, ecclesiastical concerns. All three essays voice the unwisdom of adopting a blunt theory of persecution that discounts ground-level contingencies and complexities. The medieval ideology of otherness, now visible from our vantage point, is a composite, not a prescription.
Other essays feature troubled or troubling figures on the edges of heresy and orthodoxy. Michael Bailey observes that while mystic Marguerite Porete might frown upon John of Morigny's risky ritual magic, both figures and their controversial texts exemplify struggles over discernment and interiority in the early fourteenth-century church. Justine L. Trombley writes on the discovery in Bohemia of the Latin translation of Marguerite's original French Mirror of Simple Souls, indicating its wide European dissemination. Sylvain Piron examines several manuscript witnesses of Spiritual Franciscan Barthélemy Sicard's Postilla super Danielem, arguing that the seizure of the Narbonne convent's library in 1318, and exportation of its texts to Italy, helped to diffuse Spiritual writings. Georg Modestin and Elizabeth Casteen both treat a well-placed Louis sympathetic to the Spiritual Franciscans. Modestin emphasizes “the heresiological dimension” of Louis of Bavaria's condemnation by Pope John XXII, including disobedience understood as heresy (76). Casteen examines the heresy trial of prince of Naples Louis of Durazzo, positing the interpenetration of Louis's heterodoxy and his prosecution with dynastic conflicts among Naples's ruling Angevins. Frances Kneupper discusses the mid-fifteenth-century “knowledge contest” between Augustinian theologian Johannes of Dorsten and anticlerical heretics, identified by her as brothers Janko and Livin Wirsberger (including the—un-Lernerian?—description of their letters as “precursors to the rhetoric of the Reformation” [193–94]).
Undeniable is the idiosyncrasy of executed heretic Limoux Negre, who—as Louisa Burnham argues intriguingly but not yet persuasively—may have been an assistant to the unknown author of the alchemical treatise Testamentum. Burnham's comparison of Limoux to the famous miller Menocchio reminds us that historians, like medieval inquisitors, are impelled to search for “antecedents” and “inspiration[s]” in heterodox ideas—to locate within broader intellectual networks what heretics could insist were autonomous or even revelatory (99).
Medieval people could diversely articulate their own virtue and righteousness vis-à-vis heretics, and moderns are no different. Jörg Feuchter sketches West German activist and ex-Nazi Renate Riemeck, who through her popular scholarship recast herself as analogue and heir to persecuted medieval heretics, themselves “agents of progress” (217). Feuchter's gentle presentation of this as a “tale . . . to learn from” hints at generational change amid much family resemblance in this fine book: perhaps less identification with heretics who have often appeared to medievalists as “agents of progress” but who now—in a scholarly development indebted to Robert Lerner—look more fragile as bases for our self-fashionings.
