The War on Heresy

Bob Moore’s latest monograph, a study of heresy in Europe c.1000–1300, though clearly innovative and thought-provoking, is a work hard to categorise and hence to review. With its titular allusion to the Bush ‘war on terror’, and with historiographical discussion and all but essential annotation relegated to a website (www.rimoore.net), it comes clothed as a work for the general reader (a reader needing to be told, in footnotes, who Cicero and Charlemagne were). Moore writes on that personal website of his ambition to jostle with the endless ‘new’ histories of the Crusades and lurid accounts of the Cathars on airport bookstands. Yet this ambition is likely to be frustrated by what the author himself calls his ‘pedantically painstaking text-by-text examination’, and by his rapid cutting from one episode and area to another, which may leave even more informed readers disorientated. Seen from another angle, the book, with its prefatory reference to ‘old men’ and to debates about the subject with friends and colleagues ‘for more than forty years’, might seem like a grand summation. Certainly, parts of it build upon ideas and material from Moore’s previous work. The earlier chapters revisit the sightings and condemnations of isolated groups of heretics in the eleventh century that were magisterially investigated and documented in Moore’s first books. He now, however, places greater emphasis on lay Neo-Platonism as a strand in early ‘popular’ heterodoxy, and provides further support for his arguments that it was the ‘Gregorian’ reformers who were the innovators, disruptive of local society and its customs, and that heretics were frequently supporters of reform who had gone, or been pushed, off the rails. Secondly, from The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987; rev. ante, cv [1990], 715–17. 2nd edn., 2007) come the continuing ‘villains of the piece’, the clerical bureaucrats. In this new book, their image is sharpened: they are graduates of Paris and Bologna, elaborators of an ‘ivory tower dualism’ that they attribute to heretics but that tells us, Moore claims (following Hilbert Chiu), far more about their defining of Catholic doctrine and their reading of Augustine on the Manichees than about any real contemporary religious deviance. Heresy accusations, in Moore’s current thinking, when they are not politically motivated tend to be expressions of the self-definition of a reformed Catholicism, even in advance of Lateran IV. Moreover, he further argues, many of the texts that purport to document heretical beliefs, and that stock the standard anthologies (his own, and that of Wakefield and Evans), were originally collected by an, at first sight unlikely, ally of the ‘persecuting’ clerks, that is, the Cistercians

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