Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern Europe theological uniformity was synonymous with social cohesion in societies that regarded themselves as bound together at their most fundamental levels by a religion. To maintain a belief in opposition to the orthodoxy was to set oneself in opposition not merely to church and state but to a whole culture in all of its manifestations. From the eleventh century to the fifteenth, however, dissenting movements appeared with greater frequency, attracted more followers, acquired philosophical as well as theological dimensions, and occupied more and more the time and the minds of religious and civil authorities. In the perception of dissent and in the steps taken to deal with it lies the history of medieval heresy and the force it exerted on religious, social, and political communities long after the Middle Ages. In this volume, Edward Peters makes available the most compact and wide-ranging collection of source materials in translation on medieval orthodoxy and heterodoxy in social context.

More than seventy documents, ranging in date from the early eleventh century to the early fourteenth century and representing both orthodox and heretical viewpoints are included.

Medieval Christianity evolved economic, intellectual, and theological structures to consolidate authority and test orthodoxy. This book investigates the relationships between the medieval church and the growing number of heretical groups, highlighting where they were motivated by overlapping concerns such as a zeal to live the apostolic life.

The first book to deal with all the principal treatments of heresy and anti-heretical writings during their heyday in the thirteenth century. Heresy is always relative; the traces that it leaves to us are distorted and one-sided. In the last few decades, historians have responded to these problems by developing increasingly sophisticated methodologies that help to unravel and illuminate the tangled layers from which the texts that describe heresy are built, but in the process have made our reading of heresy fractured and disconnected. Heresy and Heretics seeks to redress this by reading the different types of anti-heretical writing as part of a wider, connected tradition, considering all the principal orthodox treatments of heresy for the first time. Drawn from the mid-thirteenth century, a time when both medieval heresy and the church's response to it were at their zenith, they describe a spectrum of material that ranges from the theological arguments of some of the greatest thinkers of the age to the homely sermons of the wanderingpreachers. In considering the whole scope of anti-heretical writing from this period, it becomes apparent that, far from being an artificial construct isolated from reality, the church's treatment of heresy in fact had a far morecomplex relationship with its subject matter. Dr L.J. Sackville teaches in the Department of History, University of York.

A Source Book for Mediæval History is a scholarly piece by Oliver J. Thatcher. It covers all major historical events and leaders from the Germania of Tacitus in the 1st century to the decrees of the Hanseatic League in the 13th century.

"The book addresses a hot topic, using a source that has nowhere been given the attention it deserves. The arguments are subtle, persuasive, and frequently brilliant. It will appeal to a wide reading public—those interested in Jewish history, medieval art history, and the history of France."—William C. Jordan, author of The Great Famine