Examining the dynamic interplay between competing medieval notions of Christian observance, this book traces the escalating confrontations between piety, reform, dissent, and Church authority. It explores how diverse culture and regional settings influence major disputes over scripture, sacraments, and spiritual hierarchies of the Medieval world.

A fresh examination of the Cathar heresy, using the records of inquisitorial tribunals to bring out new details of life at the time.

First major survey of the German inquisitor Petrus Zwicker, one of the most significant figures in the repression of heresy. In the final years of the fourteenth century, waves of persecution shattered German-speaking Waldensian communities, with the scale of inquisitions matching or even greater than the better-known trials in southern France. In the middle of the persecution was the influential and enigmatic figure of the Celestine provincial and inquisitor of heresy, Petrus Zwicker (d.after 1404). His surviving texts and inquisition protocols offer a fresh, intriguing picture of the medieval repression of heresy. Zwicker was an accurate and intelligent interrogator with direct access to the Waldensians' sources and knowledge. But although he is one of the most effective inquisitors of the MiddleAges, he was even more important as the author of anti-heretical texts. His Cum dormirent homines became a standard work on Waldensianism in the fifteenth century (and this study attributes another anti-heretical treatise, the Refutatio errorum, to him). With his unique biblicist and pastoral style, Zwicker struck the right note at a moment when the Church was in crisis. His texts spread rapidly, they were preached to the people and translated into German, and helped to build the fear of heresy, anti-clericalism and disobedience in the years of the Great Western Schism. This book is the first full-length study on Zwicker and his significance to the history of heresy and its repression. It offers a meticulous analysis of the sources left by him and teases out new, ground-breaking discoveries from careful examination of previously poorly known manuscripts. Dr REIMA VALIMAKI isa postdoctoral research fellow at the Department of Cultural History, University of Turku

Exposes the inner workings of inquisitions in medieval France through expert translations of primary sources.

The aim of this book is to provide, within a short space, and primarily for the general reader, an account of the heresies of the Middle Ages and of the attitude of the Church towards them. The book is, therefore, a brief essay in the history not only of dogma, but, inasmuch as it is concerned with the repression of heresy by means of the Inquisition, of judicature also. The ground covered is the terrain of H. C. Lea's immense work, 'A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages'; but that was published more than thirty years ago, and since then much has been written, though not indeed much in English, on the mediæval Inquisition and cognate subjects. As the present work has been undertaken in the light of some of these more recent investigations, it is hoped that it may be of utility to rather closer students, as well as to the general reader, as a review of the subject suggested by the writings of Lea's successors, both partizans and critics. At the same time this book does not profess to be a history, even the briefest, of the mediæval Inquisition. Its main concern is with doctrine, and for that reason chapters on Averrhoïsm and on Wyclifitism and Husitism have been included, though they have little bearing on the Inquisition.