Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation

by Malcolm Lambert

For the third edition, this comprehensive history of the great heretical movements of the Middle Ages has been updated to take account of recent research in the field.

Genres: History, Religion, Nonfiction, Christianity, Medieval, Medieval History, European History

504 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1977

Reviews

[Jan-Maat]

I read the second edition of this book, other editions earlier and later will have their own qualities upon which I can not comment.

The subtitle is mildly misleading, not all movements were equally popular and most were endemic
in particular regions, whereas the Reformation had international tendencies. The awkwardness of this textbook is that the only common thread in all the movements described from those mysterious developments in the 10th century through to the Hussites & Lollards in the 15th is that at some point the Church authorities did not approve of them. The line between acceptable and non-acceptable beliefs was not only thin but permeable as the early history of the Franciscans shows.

The earliest movements are completely obscure beyond that they were big enough and disturbing enough to get some gnomic comments in chronicles, Lambert's second edition theory was that they were connected with the imposition of priestly celibacy, which was a process which took some time and in the areas affected meant the social downgrading of numerous daughters, mothers, sisters, aunts and nieces from respected Priests' wives to concubines such distinctions can be important I recall leading an expedition round one of our estates when we were stopped by a little old womandanger!alert she complained about the decorative potholes in the road, I, on that occasion well prepared opened out the company map and advised her to direct her comments to her local councillor, from her South London accent, perhaps she was from Catford where maybe in ancient times cats would cross the river I might have predicted her response ' yeah I know him and his WHORE', I was at that moment in loco parentis to our young apprentice and I am sorry to say that I didn't cover his ears. Since we were deep in true Blue territory I could visualise the type, a bouffant blonde, gold jewellery, and shoulder pads with everything - nightwear, underwear, swimwear, I imagined she suspected her councillor was more interested in the depth of shoulder pads than in the potholes of constituents Which highlights the problem we mostly know heresy from the point of view of the Orthodox, quite what the heretics though, particularly once one gets in to the realms of enhanced interrogation methods was not even particularly important, in some cases inquisitors certainly and absolutely knew what they were looking for and made sure that they found it.

Then there are a couple of chapters on the Cathars. At one time it was fashionable to link these to the earlier Bogomils who had been active in the region now known as Bosnia. The problem is that we are modern people and brought up on a diet of detective dramas we are schooled in the belief that scraps of evidence can be built up to tell a coherent story and that faiths and beliefs do have consistent tenets. This was probably not the case in medieval Europe and being a Cathar probably covered a spectrum of practise from at the most basic having more respect for a Cathar holy man than for the Priest and maybe publicly expressing critical opinions of the Church to at the furtherest extreme believing that the created universe was inherently evil and the only way to salvation was through universal celibacy of people and animals - there seems to have been some belief in the transmigration of souls - as a colliery one ought to practise vegetarianism but one could eat fish, because as is well know they don't reproduce but spontaneously self generate in river beds and celibacy in order to minimise births each of which prolongs the suffering of earthly existence for the soul.

The Cathars were dealt with by a crusade which progressed not from believer to believer but from castle to castle which enabled an effective transfer of political power, as we are aware from the well documented case discussed in Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error Cathar belief continued in rural areas for over a century after the Albigensian crusade and maintained a certain popular appeal.

Next the Waldensians, who were a movement local to Alpine northern Italy, eventually they merged into Protestant belief in the sixteenth century, their distinguishing feature was preaching the gospel in the vernacular and in many ways there was little to distinguish them from the later non-heretical Dominicans and Franciscans, except that they fell foul of the ecclesiastical authorities and were condemned as heretics.

Then there is Joachim of Fiore - who gets some illustrations in the plates. he had a vision of history as consisting of three great ages, the age of God the Father which was superseded by the age of God the son in which he felt he was living and which in turn would be followed by the age of the Holy spirit, after which there would be the apocalypse. There was a small monastic movement associated with him, but no popular movement, but his thinking which saw no need for the structures of the established church in an age of the spirit fed into broader hopes and fears and attitudes towards deviant belief and political shifts. Usually his visions come down to us in richly illustrated manuscripts.

Then with the Lollards and the undefeatable Hussites who close the book we are back to the vexing problem of people reading the gospels in their own vernacular which curiously seems to regularly bring the readers into disagreement with the churches founded on the same gospels. The difference here was that the teachings of Jan Hus coincided a period when there were three Popes in Europe, each with their own loyal supporters and political problems in Bohemia. The English Lollards eventually were restricted to networks of artisan families in English towns, in the sixteenth century they seem to have merged with emergent Protestants. Their core beliefs that the gospels ought to be available in the vernacular and that communion ought to be available in both kinds to the laity have since become mainstream which suggests something of a tragic arbitrariness to the whole business of heresy. This isn't a book that offers a universal theory or even pattern, although there is a repetitive theme in the popular striving towards the charismatic figure of the holy man who may or may not embody the virtues of the Apostles, or indeed the persistent threat of the charismatic faith to the institutional one and the desire of the worshipper for more emotional involvement.

The value of the work is that it is a reasonably comprehensive study and offers a fair summary of a complex phenomenon.

[Katie · Rating 3 out of 5]

The study of the history of heresy is an exercise in imagination. It requires of the historian a near impossible task: to meticulously pick out the facts that are woven in with fictions, to figure out what in the sources were what men and women actually believed, and what was attributed to them by men and women who feared the impact of their ideas and were desperate to discredit them. It also requires an exercise in imagination to determine how and why these heresies could have arisen: a task that requires one to step into the shoes of regular medieval people, a notoriously undocumented group and sift through the infinite array of influences, hopes, and disappointments.

This is why studying heresy is hard, and why it's really interesting. It's also why it's very, very hard to write a textbook about medieval heresy: you'd have to touch on pretty much everything to do it comprehensively and satisfactorily. It would have to be an economic history, a history of folklore, a history of politics, and a history of theology (to name just a few).

Malcolm Lambert's book is not a bad textbook by any means, and if you want a broad survey of different heretical movements of the period, it's an excellent place to go (If you prefer primary documents, you can also head over to Heresies of the High Middle Ages). I've used it quite a few times over the years as a nice little encyclopedia of heresies, and I think that's how it works best. It does an especially nice job with the Waldensians and the Hussites.

But, maybe unsurprisingly, it feels a bit incomplete. There's nothing to really tie it together, except for a loose thread of emphasis on the failure of reform. The sections on the background in which these heresies emerged remains very cursory and contain some pretty broad generalizations. Most problematically, it can be a bit too accepting of its sources, often describing a heresy based largely on its inquisitorial record, a very difficult source to use. Modern historians of heresy like Mark Gregory Pegg will probably not be a fan of this methodology. But a lot of these problems are not really Lambert's fault, particularly in the context of writing a textbook: they're the result of asking tough questions and lacking the requisite number of places to go for answers. Lambert's book works as an answer to the question of what a lot more than to the question of why, and while that can be frustrating, it's also not necessarily a bad thing. In a lot of ways, this remains a very helpful book.

[Victoria · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not deeply convinced of his argument that all western heresies derived from anticlerical sentiment, largely brought on by the recognition that the Gregorian reforms were practically unattainable. I wonder how Christopher Haigh would feel about this.

[Brian Griffith · Rating 3 out of 5]

What kinds of religious initiative were meritorious, and which could get you the death penalty? Lambert explores where that line lay, and who crossed it. On the one hand, popes like Innocent III (1198-1216) looked for ways to encourage initiative by both clergy and lay people. He spoke of empowering three orders of religious workers -- the clerics, monastics, and associations of married men, who would live with their families while spreading the Gospel. This "third order" of married men, Innocent advised, should be allowed to extol moral behavior, but they must leave all teaching of holy doctrine to the clergy. With that fine distinction, Innocent hoped to renew the church while retaining full control. The two goals, of course, tended to conflict.

Lambert shows how it was not enemies of Christianity, but the "over-enthusiasts", like the Waldensian lay preachers' movement, or the "Peace of God" movement, who the church most commonly condemned. The Peace of God movement, which called on laypeople to organized prayer for an end to warfare, was condemned for violating the proper division of religious labor: the priests and monastics were to lead prayers, and laypeople to do secular work.

Obviously demand was growing among ordinary believers for a share in the spiritual life of monastics, and a share in the pastoral responsibility of priests. But as Lambert shows, the church's response was less to encourage than to punish that initiative -- as if religious power was a finite resource which the clergy must hoard to itself. In that case, it seemed that the church's official goal was less to spread religion than to monopolize it. A dominator church displayed greater zeal for enforcing an upper limit to spiritual growth, than it did for uplifting the socially "sub-normal."

[Czarny Pies · Rating 4 out of 5]

Malcolm Lambert's Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation is unquestionably an excellent book. I am only giving it four stars because I have not read a great deal in the area. Hence the book could have some serious drawbacks that I am not aware of.
Lambert's book was written to serve as a text book for a course on heresies during the middle age. Overall it does an outstanding job of explaining how the Cathar, Huss, Lollard, Waldensian and several other lesser heresies emerged, how they came to conflict with the Roman Catholic Church and subsequently how their followers migrated into the various Lutheran and Reform churches that appeared during the Reformation. It is very easy to see why the three editions of this work were ultimately produced.
Lambert sees the heresies occurring as a result of the spreading of literacy, the growth of the guild and merchant class, and finally the appearance of Bibles translated into various vernaculars (i.e. French, German, and English.) It was the small merchants and artisans who were most attracted to the heresies. They were very devote and not willing to trust the great issue of their eternal salvation to the clergy as long as the bible was available only in Latin could claim they alone were able preach the Lord's message. Although the members of the heresies all came from a distinct social class, Lambert goes to great efforts to explain that their heretical practices could not be interpreted as being part of a class struggle. Being fervent Christians they simply wanted control over their own salvation. Similarly the bishops who fought against them did not see themselves as suppressing a political revolution. They saw themselves simply as fighting the devil who was promoting false doctrines.
The various heresies challenged the Catholic Church on the very issues that the Lutherans and Calvinists would later raise. They questioned the legitimacy of a professional clergy, child baptism and the absolution of sins obtained through confession. They also believed in radical poverty for the Christian Church.
The middle heretical movements had no theologians of the stature of Calvin or Luther but this was not the reason why they were ultimately suppressed or driven underground. The Catholic Church prevailed against the heresies of the middle ages because they had the solid support of the judicial, police and military organizations of the day. When the nobility embraced the Calvinist and Lutheran religions during the renaissance, they brought with them armed forces and organizations that allowed the Reformation religions to triumph in many regions.

I note the disgruntled comments from most of the other Goodreads reviewers which are likely due to the fact that the books is very dense and that the author is highly erratic in the way that he introduces new individuals, terms and concepts. Ideally one would read this book as a university undergraduate reading one chapter per week and then discussing it with colleagues in the tutorial. The professor and tutorial leader would need to be very willing to explain the many muddled passages. If you are not undergraduate enrolled in such a course, you will at a minimum need to consult Wikipedia on a fairly regular basis as you read this book in order to follow the author's argument.
Aware that he is writing a text book, Lambert then does not try to make his book easy to read nor does he try to make the data fit into any clear thesis. Lambert makes it quite clear in his introduction, he defers to the acknowledged experts in the various areas covered in the book even when he is uncomfortable with the conclusions drawn by the experts. In other words, Lambert is presenting a survey of the best current academic work on medieval heresy not trying to present his interpretation. He insists on his point of view only in those areas where he considers himself to have deep knowledge; specifically Lambert speaks most authoritatively on the subjects of French Catharism, English Lollardism and the career of John Wycliff. In this regard, Lambert is being rigorous but his scruples give an uneven quality to the book.
Many readers will also be frustrated by Lambert's insistence that there is much about the medieval heresies that will never be known because the heretics who tended to be artisans, farmers and trades people who left little documentation. Thus much of what we know about the heretics comes from the reports of the inquisitors who certainly had a very hostile bias. The situation is completely different of course when writing about the reformation where the leading players such as Jean Calvin and Martin Luther were both highly articulate and prolific. In writing about the medieval heretics, the historian most often resort to informed speculation. An historian writing for the general public will do so with a confident tone and not trouble the reader with the limitations of the data. Lambert, however, chooses to make no effort to clarify the inherently obscure.
This book is rigorous, thorough and informative. It is well worth the considerable effort required to get through it.

[Elizabeth Morgan · Rating 2 out of 5]

A textbook doing a good job of covering such a broad topic over a broad timescale would be far too big for this job this one tries to do: briefly cover the major heretical movements from the 11th to the 16th centuries.

Although aimed at students, this book sadly doesn't put the various heretical movements into much social and political context. I was disheartened to see that events that would have had major impacts on the flourishing or repression of heresies, such as the Great Schism, barely even get a mention. The final chapters, although not the direct focus of the book, assume a prior knowledge of the events and key players of the Reformation. In conjunction with other readings I'm assuming this textbook will get me through my class, but on its own it doesn't do enough with the space it's given.

On a more nit-picky note, the language used in this book was really difficult to wade through. Obviously of its time (the first edition was published in 1977), the contents may have been updated in the 2002 edition but the language hasn't. I had to read the majority of it aloud so the run-on sentences would actually make sense, as they were going nowhere in my head, and Lambert is liberal with his use of foreign phrases and archaic words in the place of a more simple (and direct) English phrasing. Obviously, I have the ability to Google them, but surely English in an English-language book makes sense? My favourite was the repeated use of 'quondom', when 'former' would not only not affect the word count, but contains fewer letters. And don't even get me started on all the extraneous commas.

If you've been assigned this book for class, IMO it's worth your time. The specifics on the major heresies (Waldensianism, Catharism, Hussitism) are quite thorough. Just remember that you need to look elsewhere to give it all some context.

[hay man · Rating 3 out of 5]

this is okay i guess. it didn't really approach the subject from the way i was hoping it would and i didn't rly like the way it was laid out but i have autism

[Lisa]

some underlining

[Dreamersemporium]

good

[Adam · Rating 2 out of 5]

The third times is not the charm. This book does not improve with age.