TY - JOUR
AU - Arnold, John H.
AB - Abstract This reappraisal of The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987) argues that R. I. Moore’s book fundamentally reshaped how medievalists think about the repression of heresy and of various “others” in medieval society. It notes also, however, that the book has often been misread as an exemplar of “Foucauldian gloom” and as representing medieval Christianity as a dominating, repressive authority. In fact Moore’s project was directed much more toward the courtly clerics involved in governance than “the Church” as such, and his project, inspired by the social theory of Mary Douglas and Max Weber, was to think about how persecution functioned socially and politically. Subsequent work on medieval heresy, leprosy, and the Jews has altered some of the landscape originally covered by Formation, but without obviating its core inquiry. But there are some key questions left unanswered by Moore’s original analysis, and it is argued that a more truly Foucauldian approach to medieval repression might now allow us to build a more variegated and complex picture. The fear which was expressed in the language of contamination, directed against the poor in general and in particular against heretics, lepers, Jews, prostitutes, vagrants and others … was the fear which the literati [= the literate elite] harboured of the rustici [= the common people] … But persecution also had a more positive function. It served to stimulate and assist the development of the claims and techniques of government in church and state, as well as the cohesiveness and confidence of those who operated it. It was the dark underside of the revival of the twelfth century, and as such inseparable from the whole anatomy.1 I can distinctly recall reading R. I. Moore’s Formation of a Persecuting Society for the first time. I was beginning my doctorate, and just starting to appreciate that one could not understand “heresy” separately from repression. Formation was a revelation, taking a landscape with which I was largely familiar but then twisting it into an intriguing new shape. The questions that it asked then about the relationships between repression, power, and social organization continue to have importance today, and not by any means only for medievalists. Before Moore’s intervention, historians had long discussed what they saw as a “resurgence” of heresy in western Europe from around about the year 1000 (heresy having effectively disappeared from Christendom since late antiquity), with both heresy and the ecclesiastical responses to the threat growing more prominent across the twelfth century, culminating in the Albigensian crusade (1209–1229) launched against the south of France, and the coming of “inquisition into heretical depravity” as a tool of repression thereafter. Moore’s Formation reframed the medieval Church’s response to heresy as a sociopolitical battle, bringing it into conjunction with adjacent acts of persecution: against Jews and lepers primarily, but also homosexuals, prostitutes, and the “undeserving” poor. The thesis of the book is largely encapsulated in the quotation above: that various phantasmic “threats” to social order were rhetorically conflated in the twelfth century, and mechanisms developed to persecute and exclude them, this process being a core element in a fundamental shift in the social and political order of Western society. Rereading the book most recently, I was reminded that Moore makes quite clear throughout that he is presenting an inquiry, an essay, an attempt to pose questions that still demand further answers; the core thesis is a suggestion, entwined with other suggestions about the nature of culture and power, the changing structures of European society, the ways in which exclusion operates sociologically. At the heart of his interpretation was a vehement refusal to blame the victim, or to see brutality and persecution as innately “medieval” and thus in need of no further analysis or explanation. In its original edition, the book begins with a very brief historiographical sketch of why Moore’s inquiry was needed, noting in particular that a perfectly admirable desire to see things from the perspective of past actors had led historians in the mid-twentieth century largely to ignore any question of why medieval people persecuted. Persecution and medievalness were assumed simply to go together—indeed, to be in some sense synonymous (a conjunction that persists today in denunciations of “medieval barbarity” in popular political discourse). This, Moore argued, was demonstrably false. We can see western Europe become a society that habitually and persistently persecuted, this change being clearly visible across the twelfth century—and lamentably visible throughout the subsequent centuries, through to the great persecutions of the mid-twentieth century (another reminder that persecution sadly cannot simply be equated with “medievalness”). But thus we must ask why such a change came about. Chapters 1 and 2 pursue this premise in greater detail, sketching a history of the treatment of heretics, Jews, and lepers from late antiquity to the High Middle Ages, noting the ways in which various twelfth-century writers conflated these groups rhetorically, and how the development of mechanisms of persecution rested upon erecting systems of classification that constructed a category of identity—“Manichee” (the name of the most famous late antique heretical group, frequently reapplied to heretics in the Central Middle Ages), “Jew,” “prostitute,” “leper”—into which the more confused reality of human actions and behaviors could be sequestered, and out of which a much more coherent “threat” could be conjured. Chapter 3 turns to the question of “why.” In pursuing his answer, Moore was much influenced by the anthropology of Mary Douglas on “pollution,” namely “the fear that the privileged feel of those at whose expense their privilege is enjoyed” (95). He drew also on Max Weber’s argument that the state’s pursuit of the monopoly of legitimate violence would lead, first, to an attack on older systems of order, and, second, to “creating what are in effect victimless crimes, offences against abstractions” (103). Proactively pursuing the punishment of these abstractions is then part of what legitimates the state and its authority. Thus things that surely existed in earlier periods—divergent beliefs and practices, Jewish communities, leprosy, prostitution, same-sex desire—become reframed and amplified as threats. It is not that such phenomena were treated kindly prior to the twelfth century; there clearly were moments and occasions on which persecution happened before then. Moore’s argument is, however, that only across the twelfth century do we find persecution becoming habitual, and enmeshed in the fundamental development of new systems of government and authority; and that having found its way to the heart of things, there it then stayed ever after. The persecuting society is our society, that which we have inherited. In chapter 4, Moore then asks the cui bono question. He begins by revisiting the move away from the legal phenomenon of the trial by ordeal—the use of freezing water or red-hot iron to determine guilt or innocence, where God’s judgment is revealed by the severity or otherwise of the effects inflicted, but where (Moore argues) the judgment of a local collectivity is, in practice, the fundamental authority. By 1200 the ordeal had given way to the legal mechanism of inquisitio—inquisition or inquiry, not by any means only into heresy—where an authority from without (for example, a bishop or papally appointed inquisitor) interrogates, orders, and classifies local knowledge in order to render judgment from on high. This late-twelfth-century shift was “the triumph of reason” (127)—but presented here not as an inevitable step up the civilizational ladder, as many previous accounts tended to depict it, but rather as a key tactic of legitimation by the new literate class of twelfth-century clerics, the self-consciously elite literati. These “new men,” trained in Latin and law and learning, were emerging from the schools of Paris and elsewhere to take on the fundamental tasks of government, most notably in the court of Henry II of England (r. 1154–1189). They formed a conscious “group” (131), connected by their training and Latinity, and aware of their shared roles in charge of the machinery of both Church and nascent state. The rhetoric of a “many-headed threat” (83) posed by heretics and others, and the mechanisms of persecution, served to consolidate their collective authority, and the increasingly depersonalized, bureaucratic “single regime” (128) that they served. Moore was not by any means the first medievalist to discuss how persecution created or indeed rested upon phantasmic ideas on the part of authority. He cites the important work of Norman Cohn on millennial groups and witchcraft, Robert Lerner on the inquisitorial invention of the sect of the “Free Spirit,” and Richard Kieckhefer on witchcraft prosecutions, and he was aware of Michel Foucault’s work on madness and on prisons (though, as he indicates in the second edition, he could not claim really to have engaged with it at the time he was writing; thus, while Formation chimes with a “Foucauldian” perspective, this is more because of a shared set of questions about how power constituted the object of its repression, rather than any direct debt).2 There was of course also considerable work already done on medieval anti-Jewish sentiment, fantasies, and actions. But Formation did fundamentally reshape the field, in several respects. One was its suggestion that different forms of persecution were linked, both rhetorically and in practical application. Another was its refusal to see persecution as innate or pathological, nor to dissolve it into an amorphous popular prejudice. A third was to suggest that we could witness a key chronological shift, to a society in which persecution was an innate element in its operations—a persecuting society, not merely a society that sometimes persecuted. That shift mattered not only in terms of accounting for a certain pattern of human suffering then and thereafter, but because it was also fundamental to how the power structures of that society operated. Persecution was a functional tool of power, not simply a moral failing. The book has rightly had a considerable influence on the field of medieval studies, and indeed beyond.3 It is one of the few anglophone medievalist works to be rendered into French, and has also been translated into Dutch and Spanish.4 Since its publication, pretty much anybody working on medieval persecution (and some early modernists similarly) has recognized that one must consider whether the persecution of different groups was interlinked and served different or additional purposes beyond confronting the apparent “threat.” It has thus become much less common for historians to assume that one can explain persecution as being prompted by the actions and very existence of its targets. (We can note that blaming the victims for their persecution is nonetheless still familiar in today’s political landscape.) Formation became also one voice in a growing chorus that questioned earlier historiographical narratives—set in place by, among others, the great U.S. medievalists Charles Homer Haskins and Joseph Strayer—that had depicted the twelfth century as a positive age of Latin learning and “renaissance,” and one in which the proto-nation-states of England and France started to build systems of centralized governmental control for the betterment of all.5 In Formation, by contrast, Latinity and bureaucracy were more clearly linked to power than “progress”; centralizing proto-states look more like the problem than the solution (an area of argument developed much further in Moore’s First European Revolution, and placed comparatively into a world-historical context in his most recent essays).6 Since its original publication, Moore’s book has forced those who work on medieval heresy to think very hard about the extent to which the groups they study were distorted, amplified, or indeed totally fantasized by those who prosecuted them. At the same time, in this and other areas, more recent research has changed elements of the picture. When Moore first wrote, he was informed by revisionist work that had questioned the size and coherence of the Waldenses (a heretical group that first appeared in France in the late twelfth century, inspired by apostolic ideals); subsequent and more recent work on that sect has in fact emphasized how much one can see some kind of a “movement,” with real connections between late medieval Waldensian communities.7 Similar arguments regarding the coherence, real beliefs, and organization of the “Cathars”—those southern French and northern Italian dualist heretics much beloved in popular literature and southern French tourism—have been particularly fierce in recent years, with Moore himself as a key participant.8 On an even broader canvas, Moore’s reframing of twelfth-century change has sharpened recent arguments about historical shifts in social organization, the relationship between government, learning, and power, and the kind of transformation that European society saw across the High Middle Ages. What previous medievalists had seen as a civilizational step forward—the appearance of centers of learning such as the nascent University of Paris, the centralization of English and French royal government, the increased use of bureaucratic recordkeeping, the shift from “ordeal” to “inquisition” outlined above—is now something we are invited to consider in terms of a change in social organization, power, and governmentality.9 In chapters added to the second edition of the book, Moore himself has noted a variety of subsequent work that has further revised specific aspects of his canvas.10 As mentioned above, debates over the reality or “inventedness” of medieval heresy, and the interplay between heretical identity and persecuting authority, have continued across a range of specific areas, most heatedly in regard to the Cathars, perhaps with most productive nuance in regard to the “Lollard” heretics of late medieval England.11 There has been further work also on the rhetoric of persecution itself, some of which indicates greater variation in polemical perspective than one would gather from Formation. It is now clear, for example, that while medieval orthodox polemicists might depict heretics and others as linked into one “many-headed monster,” they could also vehemently insist upon the fragmented and fissiparous nature of heresies; and clear also that the nature of the polemic and the categorizing claims varied according to textual genre.12 This does not dismantle Moore’s argument—the polemics and processes to which he pointed still stand as elements in the dominant discourses of the period—but it complicates our sense of the cultural and textual landscape within which they operated. We also know more now about the treatment of medieval lepers, and much of this directly challenges the sense of “persecution” in this particular area; it is now clear that lepers were not forced into leprosaria, and that the restrictions placed upon those who entered such establishments were modeled upon the “regulated” space of the monastery rather than the prison.13 Work on medieval antisemitism has explored greater regional and chronological variation and meanings, and has noted among other aspects how complexly the figure of “the Jew” could function in the Christian imaginaire, including in the absence of any actual Jewish people (as in later medieval England, for example).14 Here the drive has in one sense moved away from Moore’s focus on rhetorical interconnection, but in another has continued to be inspired by his analysis of how the rhetoric and practices of exclusion operate and function for society and culture generally, not only in regard to the victims. In all of these areas, even as aspects of the original thesis are amended or questioned, Formation has been hugely productive in inspiring engagement and debate within medieval studies. Elements of its core arguments have been intermittently noted by early modernists, though the links that it suggests between state formation and persecution would bear further comparative exploration.15 It has also prompted a slightly odd counter-reaction, from those who read the book as presenting an unfairly negative view of medieval society and the medieval Church as relentlessly hostile to outsiders; such readings have led to a countervailing pursuit of the theme of “tolerance” in the period, and a desire to defend the Church and medieval society in general.16 Thus the book has also become something of a negative touchstone for a variety of scholars who wish to indicate that they have a more optimistic and positive view of the medieval Church and medieval Christianity. In fact, as Moore himself notes in the second edition, “the Church” as such was not his target; when he wrote of the literati and “the clerks,” he was thinking most particularly of those secular clerics, trained in the schools but then pursuing power in secular courts, such as that of Henry II of England. The confusion here perhaps relates in part to the Foucauldian turn as experienced particularly in the study of medieval literature, where quite a lot of work on medieval lay piety has been carried out. Medieval literary scholars from the 1980s onward often read Michel Foucault’s work on discourse as presenting cultural power as all-encompassing and inescapable; some would look to practices such as religious confession as exemplars of repressive apparatus. (Medieval historians, in contrast, where they took up Foucault at all, tended to be focused mostly on his contribution to histories of medicine and of sexuality.) Moore’s “persecuting society” seemed to many to fit neatly into the “Foucauldian gloom,” either chiming nicely with analyses that emphasized the “power” aspects of religion or, in more recent works, presenting itself as an overly negative and repressive view of the medieval Church against which more positive readings could be positioned.17 These might be argued to be rather impoverished readings of Foucault (whose later work on power, in particular, emphasizes a field of relationships, rather than simply the “repression” of anything); and they are definitely misreadings of Moore. What Moore in fact gives us is a way of thinking about how ideologies move between ecclesiastical and secular contexts (just as ecclesiastics themselves moved), focusing particularly on the episcopate and royal court, but gesturing also toward the wider world beyond. He was fundamentally unwilling to see clerics as simply reflecting an assumed “popular opinion” or giving voice to some more amorphous Zeitgeist, but neither does he present a picture of “the Church” straightforwardly imposing its views. The story sketched in Formation—deliberately sketched, as Moore makes it clear at a number of points that the book was aiming at prompting future investigation—is of a set of concatenations: the availability, from patristic and other sources, of rhetoric and narratives that demonized and linked together different “threats”; the development of legal mechanisms of investigation and categorization; the emergence of a self-conscious literate collective class in the courts of Europe, who were the key players in processes of proto-state formation. The classical and patristic legacy was reworked “by those who sought solutions to present [perceived] needs” (83). As a rhetoric that conflated the danger of Jews, lepers, and heretics combined with mechanisms of persecution that categorized and reified threats, so persecution amplified and enlarged the very specter it had conjured up. And all of this spoke to the emerging needs of a changing sociopolitical world, within which the literati were to play a key role. They did not deliberately and cold-bloodedly dream up the threats they then sought to persecute; but what they set in motion undoubtedly served their purposes. It needs to be remembered that Formation is not ultimately a book about heresy or the marginalized, but about a change in the mechanisms of the sociopolitical order in the twelfth century. On that point, I want to conclude this reappraisal by raising three questions of my own. One is essentially a medievalist’s question: whether Moore’s Anglo-Norman perspective—the importance in his argument of the literati connected to the court of Henry II of England (something emphasized further in his recent War on Heresy [2012])—limits the utility of the analysis overall. Do the conjunctions of literate bureaucrats, centralized power, and ideological representations work quite so well if we are in southern Europe, in the courts—and in the somewhat, or extremely, independent towns and cities—of southern France, the Iberian Peninsula, northern Italy? Other scholars have already noted a potential contrast between northern European repression and Iberian convivencia.18 But the issues go beyond societal practices and cultural interchange, to the fundamental mechanisms that Moore suggests underlie the persecuting society. In the Mediterranean countries, in the twelfth century, we also find a highly literate culture, but rather different in various ways from the literati emerging from Paris—less university-focused, happier to move fluidly between Latin and vernacular writing, used to deploying Roman law concepts across a wide range of situations. We have some important communities that were rather more used to the daily interactions between sizable different faith groups, for example, the various trading cities on the Mediterranean coasts. And, until the mid-thirteenth century, at least (and arguably not even then), we mostly lack the kind of centralized state-building visible in the Anglo-Norman realm. These areas had and used the legal process of inquisitio, both secular and ecclesiastical, and one can certainly see both the rhetoric and the practice of persecution. But the sense of “threat,” while partly heretical (the heretics of southern France and Italy that most modern historians call “Cathars”), is probably most obviously that which came from beyond Christendom: the Islamic lands on the other side of the Mediterranean basin. In short, is “the formation of a persecuting society,” particularly in the twelfth century, largely a northwestern European phenomenon? (It should be said that Moore might reasonably respond, “But of course!”) Another question has broader methodological import. Could we investigate further the different possible relationships between rhetoric and persecution—an area where Moore’s work already provides ample food for thought, from which non-medievalists would benefit? Two of the misreadings of his work that Moore addresses in the second edition are the idea that the literati deliberately set about creating a rhetoric to then effect persecution, and, as noted further above, that the book was seeking to characterize medieval Christianity itself as innately persecutory. I think one reason why these readings come about is that Formation tends to present the rhetoric it analyzes as effortlessly powerful—that the conflation and amplification of threat was something that prompted action and legitimated power without challenge. Here the question of how one gets from Latin writers adapting patristic heresiography to a wider cultural influence is somewhat elided, but can be recognized as a specific version of a more general question for all historians interested in persecution, namely the issue of how negative stereotyping and propaganda work. That is, do rhetorics of persecution respond to or directly form wider cultural attitudes? What wider apparatus or prior cultural context must be in place in order that fears of pollution, contamination, and the “outsider” can be activated politically? Moore also tends to emphasize the unity of the discourse; as he wrote in the conclusion to his first chapter, “For all imaginative purposes, heretics, Jews and lepers were interchangeable … through them the Devil was at work to subvert the Christian order and bring the world to chaos” (61). But that is rhetorical overstatement. There were in fact “imaginative” purposes where these groups were not conflated, nor linked to the Devil, for example, in treatises where either a Jew or a heretic is presented as a means by which the detail of Christian doctrine can be explored and defended; and in the case of lepers, where an imaginative link to Christ’s sufferings and miracles, and the possibilities of charity, could be present as much as more negative associations.19 If discourses about heresy were not in fact monovocal, and only intermittently entwined with discourses about Jews, lepers, and other groups, what is it that allows the “persecuting” rhetoric to inform, prompt, or legitimate (the choice of transitive verb here is also in need of further analysis) acts of actual persecution? And what needed to be in place materially—what kind of “proto-state apparatus”—in order that persecution actually took place? Again, this is an area where cross-cultural and cross-period comparison would be illuminating. Lastly, I’ve noted the extent to which Formation was explicitly informed by the anthropology of Mary Douglas and the sociology of Max Weber. Someone following in Moore’s footsteps now would probably augment these figures with more recent theoretical touchstones, though whether that would alter the basic analysis is unlikely.20 Informed by the anthropology in particular, Moore tends to present an ever so slightly rose-tinted view of the “kinship group” world that pertains prior to the imposition of the more bureaucratic “state-like” processes; in that sense, it shares a certain dynamic with some of James C. Scott’s more recent analyses of state control and its limits and impositions.21 But a kinship/state contrast is not really the core argument of the book. Rather, in pushing against a set of received assumptions about “progress” in the twelfth century, one can say that Moore was engaged in a project similar in shape to Michel Foucault’s attempts to point out the dangers and operations of power in each apparent civilizational step “forward.” But what if Foucault had figured more largely in the analysis, and what if Moore had been able to read the later Foucault, who had developed a more subtle analysis of power and its operations?22 From such a perspective we might find that the “persecuting society” was one in which there was a greater distribution of identities rather than simply insiders and all-those-lumped-together-as-outsiders. We might explore, for example, a sense in which the development of different lay Christian identities was beginning to throw up further unintended consequences and elaborations, of gender, status, and the constant reworking of worldly and spiritual boundaries. And perhaps also more of a sense of how the persecuting, as well as the persecuted, were set within a wider field of power: how mechanisms of inquisition and their accompanying bureaucracies altered the landscape of governance and began to depersonalize things like “truth” and “authority,” not always to the benefit of those who sometimes wielded them (thinking here, among other things, of various bishops who ended up on the wrong side of an investigative process in the later thirteenth century).23 Beyond the medieval, we might then ask for other periods whether the apparatus of repression does other kinds of “work” beyond excluding and silencing its immediate targets. But this is to end on a point of imaginative departure prompted not by any flaw in Moore’s book, but precisely by its continuing inspirational charge. The influence of Formation has rightly been great. Its power comes in part from being a short book that dares to traverse a very broad landscape in order to pose large questions. There is inevitably more that can be said and explored in each area that it touches upon, and it is open to revision on certain points; but that is the price paid for daring to argue on such a scale. This is a book that was happy to say, in regard to the issue of how persecuting attitudes arise, that “the question is not only of evident historical importance but of some theoretical interest” (102). That relationship—not only historical, but also theoretical—is at the core of Moore’s work here, and despite its inevitable flaws, it thus shows us a kind of history that dares to speak outward, beyond the detail of the field, to demonstrate the contribution that medieval history can make to wider conversations and debates. That is a useful reminder to historians of all periods of the potential task we might set ourselves. John H. Arnold is Professor of Medieval History at the University of Cambridge, a position he took up in 2016, having previously worked for many years at Birkbeck, University of London. He is author of various books, including Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (Bloomsbury, 2005) and What Is Medieval History? (Polity, 2008); editor of The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity (Oxford University Press, 2014); and co-editor with Matthew Hilton and Jan Rüger of History after Hobsbawm: Writing the Past for the Twenty-First Century (Oxford University Press, 2018). Notes 1R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe, 950–1250, 2nd ed. (Oxford, 2007; 1st ed. 1987), 131–132. All references below are to the text of the second edition. 2Norman Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons: An Enquiry Inspired by the Great Witch-Hunt (London, 1975); Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley, Calif., 1972); Richard Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture, 1300–1500 (London, 1976); Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society, 172. 3The second edition prompted a notable debate in the online section of the British newspaper The Guardian: Madeleine Bunting, “Our Tendency to Persecute Others Is as Alive Today as in Medieval Times,” December 16, 2007, www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2007/dec/17/comment.religion. 4La persécution: Sa formation en Europe, Xe–XIIIe siècles (Paris, 1991); Ketters, heksen en andere zondebokken: Vervolging als middel tot macht, 950–1250 (Antwerp, 1988); La formación de una sociedad represora: Poder y disidencia en la Europa occidental, 950–1250 (Barcelona, 1989). There was no German translation, though it is well-known to German scholars, and his subsequent First European Revolution (see n. 6 below) has appeared in German as Die erste europäische Revolution: Gesellschaft und Kultur im Hochmittelalter (Munich, 2001). 5The classic works are Charles Homer Haskins, The Renaissance of the Twelfth Century (New York, 1927); and Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, N.J., 1970). 6R. I. Moore, The First European Revolution, c. 970–1215 (Oxford, 2000); “The Eleventh Century in Eurasian History: A Comparative Approach to the Convergence and Divergence of Medieval Civilizations,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 33, no. 1 (2003): 1–21; “The Transformation of Europe as a Eurasian Phenomenon,” Medieval Encounters 10, no. 1–3 (2004): 77–98; “Medieval Europe in World History,” in Carol Lansing and Edward D. English, eds., A Companion to the Medieval World (Oxford, 2009), 563–580; “Medieval Christianity in a World Historical Perspective,” in John H. Arnold, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity (Oxford, 2014), 76–90; “The First Great Divergence?,” Medieval Worlds, no. 1 (2015): 16–24. 7See Peter Biller, “Goodbye to Waldensianism?,” Past & Present 192 (August 2006): 3–33. 8Formation informed the work of a number of French scholars of heresy, notably Jean-Louis Biget and his student Julien Théry-Astruc, and Moore was invited to contribute a “postscript” to the important collection Inventer l’hérésie?, edited by Monique Zerner (Nice, 1998). Encouraged in part by Mark Gregory Pegg’s The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245–1246 (Princeton, N.J., 2001) and subsequent articles, Moore has further developed his argument in Formation that “the medieval Manichee was a myth” in The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe (London, 2012), though many in the field have demurred over the extent to which this minimizes the reality of heretical believers and their self-organization. A variety of responses, including further chapters by Moore and Pegg, can be found in Antonio Sennis, ed., Cathars in Question (York, 2016). 9For recent examples displaying distinctly Moore-ish influences, see Florian Mazel, “Pour une redéfinition de la réforme ‘grégorienne,’” in Michelle Fournié, Daniel Le Blévec, Florian Mazel, et al., La réforme “grégorienne” dans le Midi (milieu XIe–début XIIIe siècle), Cahiers de Fanjeaux 48 (Toulouse, 2013), 9–38; and Pierre Chastang, “Réforme grégorienne et administration par l’écrit des patrimoines ecclésiastiques dans le Midi de la France (Xe–XIIIe siècle),” ibid., 495–522. 10Formation, 144–196; n.b. 167–169 for an adjusted argument regarding Jews in particular. 11Regarding Cathars, see n. 8 above. On Lollards, note most recently J. Patrick Hornbeck, What Is a Lollard? Dissent and Belief in Late Medieval England (Oxford, 2010); Fiona Somerset, Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings after Wyclif (Ithaca, N.Y., 2014). 12L. J. Sackville, Heresy and Heretics in the Thirteenth Century: The Textual Representations (York, 2011); Irene Bueno, Defining Heresy: Inquisition, Theology, and Papal Policy in the Time of Jacques Fournier, trans. Isabella Bolognese, Tony Brophy, and Sarah Rolfe Prodan (Leiden, 2015). 13Timothy S. Miller and Rachel Smith-Savage, “Medieval Leprosy Reconsidered,” International Social Science Review 81, no. 1–2 (2006): 16–28; Carole Rawcliffe, Leprosy in Medieval England (Woodbridge, 2006). 14David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, N.J., 1996); Nirenberg, Neighboring Faiths: Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago, 2014); Miri Rubin, Gentile Tales: The Narrative Assault on Late Medieval Jews (New Haven, Conn., 1999); Anthony Bale, The Jew in the Medieval Book: English Antisemitisms, 1350–1500 (Cambridge, 2006); Bale, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London, 2010); Sara Lipton, Dark Mirror: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Jewish Iconography (New York, 2014). 15For example, John D. Martin, Representations of Jews in Late Medieval and Early Modern German Literature, 2nd ed. (Bern, 2006); Randolph C. Head and Daniel Christensen, “Introduction,” in Head and Christensen, eds., Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Early Modern German Culture: Order and Creativity, 1500–1750 (Leiden, 2007), 1–24. 16See Cary J. Nederman, Worlds of Difference: European Discourses of Toleration, c. 1100–c. 1550 (University Park, Pa., 2000). 17See, for example, Claire M. Waters, Translating “Clergie”: Status, Education, and Salvation in Thirteenth-Century Vernacular Texts (Philadelphia, 2015). 18Maya Soifer, “Beyond convivencia: Critical Reflections on the Historiography of Interfaith Relations in Christian Spain,” Journal of Medieval Iberian Studies 1, no. 1 (2009): 19–35, here 28. 19For example, Julie Orlemanski, “How to Kiss a Leper,” postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies 3, no. 2 (2012): 142–157; though note also Susan Zimmerman, “Leprosy in the Medieval Imaginary,” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 38, no. 3 (2008): 559–587. 20I note that Chastang, “Réforme grégorienne et administration,” references Giorgio Agamben in regard to his discussion of the power of the bureaucratic state, though the point he pursues would seem to be recognizably Weberian. 21James C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, Conn., 1999); Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (New Haven, Conn., 2010). 22A helpful starting point for which is Foucault’s essay “The Subject and Power,” presented as an afterword to Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago, 1992), 208–226. 23Two post-Moore attempts to bring Foucault and inquisition together are James B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance in Languedoc (Ithaca, N.Y., 1997); and John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, 2001). © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical Association. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com.
TI - Persecution and Power in Medieval Europe: The Formation of a Persecuting Society, by R. I. Moore
JF - The American Historical Review
DO - 10.1093/ahr/123.1.165
DA - 2018-02-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/persecution-and-power-in-medieval-europe-the-formation-of-a-decU3QJ6MU
SP - 165
EP - 174
VL - 123
IS - 1
DP - DeepDyve
ER -