Recent Trends and Future Directions in the Study of Medieval Religion, Heresy and Inquisitions

The field of heresy studies appears to be an endlessly productive one, and this article situates the contributions of six new major publications within the context of recent historiographical trends in the study of medieval piety, heresy and inquisition. These trends include the problematisation of earlier conceptual categories used to study inquests, heresy and religion. Until quite recently, the study of medieval religion has often been dominated by bipolar categories: lay/clerical, Latin/vernacular, orthodox/heterodox, scholastic/monastic, authoritarian repression/dissent, popular/academic, tolerance/persecution.1 Moreover, the study of belief and practice has tended to be split into chronological periods, each with their scholars and their own period-specific prevailing theories and debates: the patristic period, dominated by Augustine and early church councils and creeds;2 a ‘Dark Age’ period (500–950 CE) in which heresy appears virtually to disappear (or has been little studied);3 the ‘rebirth’ of ‘heresy’ in the eleventh century and the gradual development of what Robert Moore influentially termed a ‘persecuting society’ (during a period also characterised by ambivalent treatment of Jews, lepers and Muslims, the twelfth century ‘Renaissance’, increasing urban and economic growth, the rise of scholasticism, burgeoning and contested claims staked to the ‘apostolic life’, and the growth of government institutions and bureaucracies);4 and the later Middle Ages, characterised by a multiplicity of religious options which blurred many of the binaries laid out above both in the cases of individuals and of groups.5 The relationship of the later medieval period and its manifold developments to what came before (the ‘High’ Middle Ages) and what came afterwards (the early modern era with its reformations, witch trials and religious wars) is also hotly contested

Ancient history · Archaeology · Heresy · Theology · Historical and Linguistic Studies · History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity