This thought-provoking volume is the second edited collection to emerge from the Leeds International Medieval Congress of 2009, which took heresy as its central theme; the other is Roach and Simpson’s Heresy and the Making of European Culture (2013). This attests to the vibrancy of the field. Collections that begin as a series of loosely connected conference papers can lack coherence, but the editors have chosen and positioned the contributions well. The overarching theme here is the contextualizing of accusations of heresy within political events and environments. While this is not an original approach, the individual articles each offer us something new, and there are some outstanding contributions.

The collection is heavily concerned with intellectual heresies, or with individual heretics with a high profile. In the first section, Andrew E. Larsen’s “Secular Politics and Academic Condemnation at Oxford, 1358–1411” reads accusations against John Wyclif within a wider set of trials. Thomas A. Fudge’s “‘O Cursed Judas’: Formal Heresy Accusations Against Jan Hus” and Henry Ansgar Kelly’s “Questions of Due Process and Conviction in the Trial of Joan of Arc” focus on the uses and abuses of power in famous cases. Notable in historiographical terms is Karen Bollerman and Cary J. Nederman’s “Standing in Abelard’s Shadow: Gilbert of Poitiers, the 1148 Council of Reims, and the Politics of Ideas,” which challenges some key elements of R. I. Moore’s influential “persecuting society” model, suggesting that it divorces “intellectual” and “popular” heretical spheres too readily.

Four authors then make original observations on the ways in which heresy was conceptualized and constructed over a long period, including the identification of intellectuals as heretics long after their death. Shedding new light on the use of some important texts, these articles include Frank Godthardt’s “The Papal Condemnation of Marsilius of Padua’s Defensor Pacis: Its Preparation and Political Use,” and two in which William of Ockham’s work was (mis)used: Thomas M. Izbicki’s “Tarring Conciliarism with the Brush of Heresy: Juan de Torquemada’s Summa de ecclesia” and Takashi Shogimen’s “Ockham, Almain, and the Idea of Heresy.” The most impressive of all in this section is Thomas Turley’s “Making a Heresiarch: Guido Terreni’s Attack on Joachim of Fiore.” He discusses the significance of Terreni’s fourteenth-century Summa de haeresibus. Although not widely influential after its composition, it is clearly important to historians in understanding the processes through which the definition of what a heretic was, which could be “stretched” to include someone on the basis of how their ideas had been used, even long after their death.

The final section offers case studies to illustrate that accusations of heresy can rarely be divorced from the political world. Targets may inhabit the highest circles, as in John Phillip Lomax’s study of the struggle between Frederick II and Gregory IX, “Hints and Allegations: The Charge of Infidelity in Papal and Imperial Propaganda, 1239–1245,” or the humblest, as in Jerry B. Pierce’s fascinating and important account of the demise of the Order of the Apostles, “Autonomy, Dissent, and the Crusade against Fra Dolcino in Fourteenth-Century Valesia.” Finally, Bettina Koch’s “Religious Dissent in Premodern Islam: Political Usage of Heresy and Apostasy in Nizam al-Mulk and Ibn Tamiyya” offers both a free-standing and comparative perspective on the religiopolitical processes that first demonize an enemy — as “apostate” rather than “heretic” in the case of Islam — before they can destroy it.

The few negative comments I have about the book do not relate to the content of the articles. The admittedly witty gambling metaphors around which the work is structured make me uncomfortable. Part 1 is “‘Razing’ the Stakes: Personal Trials and Political Tribulations,” part 2, “Joker’s Wild: Misappropriations of Orthodoxy and Misrepresentations of Heterodoxy,” and part 3, “The House Always Wins: Power Politics and the Threat of Force.” These arguably trivialize the subject matter, and certainly do not reflect the serious and ethical approach otherwise taken by the editors (for example, the dedication is “to all the men and women who have been accused of heresy across the ages”). A scattering of proofreading errors detract from the otherwise very professional writing (for example at 43, twice at 153, and at 154 and 197). Finally, a note to the publisher: the tiny print size would be less of a problem to the reader if the print quality itself was higher and/or the paper heavier.