Heresy, Dissent, and Reform in the Late Medieval Church
The three articles collected here trace the main currents of religious dissent that the Latin church had to confront between the closing of the Council of Vienne in 1312 and the Compacts of Basel in 1436. Taken together they follow two Oxford- and Prague-trained theologians whose biblical and eucharistic challenges (John Wycliffe and Jan Hus) shattered the lives of thousands of ordinary believers, alongside a long-running dossier of older movements — Cathars, Waldensians, Beguines, Spiritual Franciscans — that the inquisitors had been cataloguing since the 1230s. R. N. Swanson has argued in Church and Society in Late Medieval England (1989) that heresy in this period is best read as a barometer of the institutional church’s failure to absorb lay piety; others, such as Malcolm Lambert and Berndt Hamm, have stressed instead the constructive theological ambitions of the heretics themselves. The section also pays attention to the instruments of repression: the papal inquisition, mendicant crusade preaching, and the new university-based theology that supplied the church with its refutations.
Oxford and Prague: the academic heretics
The first two articles examine the two most influential dissenting movements of the period, both rooted in university theology. Wycliffe’s Oxford career produced a stream of Latin tracts — the De civili dominio (c. 1374–76), the De Eucharistia (c. 1378–80), the English Wycliffite Bible associated with his circle — that John Purvey and the Lollard preachers carried into the market squares and alehouses of southern England. The article on the Lollard movement follows the trail through the Blackfriars Council of 1382, the De heretico comburendo statute of 1401, and the long twilight of Lollardy traced by Anne Hudson and Margaret Aston. The companion article follows Jan Hus from his 1402 appointment as preacher at the Bethlehem Chapel in Prague to his execution at Constance on 6 July 1415, and from the defenestration of the aldermen in 1419 to the negotiated settlement that followed the Battle of Taus (Domažlice) in 1431. The article also surveys the Four Articles of Prague — the chalice for the laity, the punishment of mortal sin in the clergy, the poverty of the church, and the free preaching of the gospel — that defined moderate Hussite demands.
The older heresies and the inquisitorial record
The third article steps back from the English and Bohemian cases to map the wider heretical landscape. It traces the slow collapse of Catharism in Languedoc after the treaty of Meaux-Paris in 1229 and the last recorded bons hommes at the Pyrenean village of Montaillou in the 1320s (the subject of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurin’s Montaillou); the survival of the Waldensian communities of the Cottian Alps, condemned afresh by the inquisitor Reinerius Sacconi in the 1250s; the suppression of the Beguines and Beghards of the Rhineland, condemned by Cum de quibusdam mulieribus in 1310; and the troubled history of the Spiritual Franciscans from the bull Quo elongati (1230) to the executions of 1318. The article draws on the documentary editions of the Mansi conciliar record and on the inquisition registers edited by Yves Dossat and others, and it situates the dissidents in the long-running debate, opened by Herbert Grundmann and continued by Caterina Bruschi and Peter Biller, over how far medieval heresy was a coherent social movement or a label imposed from above.
What this section covers
- John Wycliffe and the Lollard movement
- Jan Hus and the Hussite Wars
- The major heresies of medieval Europe