The Dissemination of Barthélemy Sicard's Postilla super Danielem

The process through which a group of devout Franciscans and their lay followers in southern France gradually moved away from obedience to the Roman Church, were condemned as heretics in May 1318, and were then hunted down throughout lower Languedoc, is one of the best documented cases of collective heretication in medieval Europe. 1 The story of these Spiritual Franciscans and their Beguin followers could even serve as a model in helping historians to realize that heresy is neither just the projection of inquisitorial fantasies, nor the expression of a revolutionary will to break with ecclesiastical authority, but rather the result of a complex interaction between opposing forces whose conflicting views over what constitutes a legitimate Christian community gradually harden to the point of becoming entirely irreconcilable.Robert Lerner has made the crucial point that the Beguins are the first popular dissidents to make abundant use of writings. 2These books or quires allowed them to engage in repeated collective readings of the key documents defining their beliefs and convictions, most of which were works by Peter John Olivi.Yet, as far as is known, none of the volumes that circulated in Languedoc at the time have been preserved.During the core of the repression period (1318-25), while about a hundred Beguins were burned at the stake, confiscated books and papers were probably also destroyed.The great mission that the Beguin Peire Trencavel set himself after his escape from the Wall (Carcassonne's inquisitorial prison) in 1323 was to save Olivi's written texts from destruction. 3While entrusting a number of these books to Johan Adzorit and Johan Rotgier, both secular priests in Béziers, [36] Trencavel was planning to meet 1 Raoul Manselli, Spirituali e beghini in Provenza (Rome, 1959); David Burr, The Spiritual Franciscans: From 2

Computer Science · French Literature and Criticism · Historical and Literary Studies