Historiographical survey of inquisition texts, from lists of questions to inquisitor's manual, studies their role in the suppression of heresy.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

The essays in this book provide new insights into the history of heresy and the formation of the persecuting society in the Middle Ages and explores the shifting understanding of orthodoxy and heterodoxy in medieval and modern times.

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.

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.

This concise and balanced survey of heresy and inquisition in the Middle Ages examines the dynamic interplay between competing medieval notions of Christian observance, tracing the escalating confrontations between piety, reform, dissent, and Church authority between 1100 and 1500. Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane explores the diverse regional and cultural settings in which key disputes over scripture, sacraments, and spiritual hierarchies erupted, events increasingly shaped by new ecclesiastical ideas and inquisitorial procedures. Incorporating recent research and debates in the field, her analysis brings to life a compelling issue that profoundly influenced the medieval world.

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