Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-xtgtn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T15:24:51.550Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Some heretical attitudes to the renewal of the church

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

R. I. Moore
R. I. Moore*
Affiliation:
University of Sheffield
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

For the most part the authors of the few lurid and fragmentary accounts we have of eleventh and early twelfth-century heretics concentrated almost exclusively on their virulent denunciations of the church, its authority, its sacraments and its priests. Consequently such success as they had has generally been explained in negative terms as the exploitation of anti-clerical sentiment arising from resentment of the church’s corruption on the one hand and the extension of its claims on the other, or as the embrace of alien doctrines imported from outside western christendom. That the second explanation is no longer held to apply before the middle of the twelfth century makes it the more necessary to ask again whether the ability of extremely varied manifestations of religious dissent to attract support in many places did not imply the existence of some positive alternative to orthodoxy, some conception of what a church might be, or what its renewal should involve.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 14: Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History , 1977 , pp. 87 - 93
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1977

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 The sources of this discussion are collected, in English translation, in Moore, R. I., The Birth of Popular Heresy (London 1975) pp 1–71 Google Scholar; most of them are also in Wakefield, W. L. and Evans, A. P., Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York and London 1969) pp 71–150 Google Scholar.

2 Grundmann; Manselli, [R.], [‘Il monaco Enrico e la sua eresia]’, B1SMEAM 65 (1953) pp 36–62 Google Scholar, discussed by [Moore, R.I., The] Origins [of European Dissent (London forthcoming)] cap 4 Google Scholar; Nelson, Janet L., ‘Society, Theodicy and the Origins of Heresy’, SCH 9 (1972) pp 65–77 Google Scholar and Moore, R. I., ‘The Cult of the Heresiarch’, paper presented to the fourth (Oxford 1974)Google Scholar conference of the Commission internationale pour l’histoire écclésiastique comparée, to appear.

3 Southern, R.W., The Making of the Middle Ages (London 1953) p 154 Google Scholar.

4 PL 185 (1860) col 412.

5 Douglas, M., Natural Symbols (London 2 ed 1973) p 187 Google Scholar.

6 Leach, E., Culture and Communication (Cambridge 1976) pp 35-6CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also pp 33-5, 51-2, 77-9.

7 Compare Cowdrey, H. E. J., ‘The Peace and Truce of God’ PP 46 (1970) pp 49–56 Google Scholar; Vermeesch, A., Essai sur les origines et la signification de la commune dans le nord de la France (XIe-XIIe siècle) (Heule 1966) pp 25–77 Google Scholar.

8 This aspect of the papal reform is particularly clear in its connection with Milan; for example, Cowdrey, H. E. J., ‘The Papacy, the Patarenes, and the Church of Milan’ TRHS 5 series 18 (1968) pp 25-9Google Scholar.

9 Tractatus contra Petrobrusianos ed Fearns, J. V., CC continuatio mediaevalis 10 (1968) p 14 Google Scholar.

10 Gesta pontificum cenomannensium, Bouquet 12 p 549.

11 Manselli, pp 55-6.

12 Fredcricq 2 p 30.

13 PL 142 (1853) col 1272.

14 Brown, P. R. L., ‘Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change’, Daedalus (Cambridge, Mass., 1975) pp 133-55Google Scholar; see also Morris, Colin, ‘Judicium Dei: The Social and Political Significance of the Ordeal in the Eleventh Century’, SCH 12 (1975) pp 95–111 Google Scholar. who reflects in conclusion that the ordeal tended to assist the weak against the established order.

15 Guibert of Nogent De vita sua, PL 156 (1880) col 953 Google Scholar.

16 Roger of Hoveden, Chronica, ed Stubbs, W., 4 vols, RS 51 (1868-71) 2, p 163 Google Scholar; PL 185 cols 410-16. These points are discussed at greater length in Origins caps 9 and 10.