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Catholic Reformations: a medieval perspective

John H. Arnold

We hear a jumble of heterodox voices growing louder, many

inspired by the example of the early apostles and the

purity and simplicity of the primitive church, some

drawing upon a reinvigorated classical tradition of logic

and philosophy. Some voices are reformist, some are

apocalyptic, some call for greater lay involvement in the

faith, some come to challenge the very authority of the

Catholic church. Core tenets of faith are questioned –

the nature of the sacraments, the Eucharist in particular

– and radical preachers decry the suitability of the

clergy to their task, denouncing the twin taints of sex

and money. Secular powers become increasingly involved,

certain battle lines are drawn, and bloodily, over time,

it becomes more or less clear where the Catholic faith ends,

and heresy begins. In response to the agonistic struggle

of orthodoxy and heterodoxy, the papacy champions the

radical ideas of new mendicant religious orders (ideas

which depend in part upon adapting and translating the

heterodox challenge into new tools for the maintenance of

Catholic orthodoxy); and convenes a great reforming

council, which regularises the powers and duties of the

clergy across Europe, reinvigorating the parochial

system, and attempting to ensure that the laity can be

made truly (Catholic) Christian.

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The thumbnail sketch above could – at a push, squinting

at it somewhat – describe two different periods in

European history: the growth of protesting voices

(decrying clerical concubinacy and the sale of

indulgences in particular), culminating in Luther,

Calvin, Zwingli and others, leading to the Protestant

Reformation and the Catholic counter-reformation. Or it

could describe the period c. 1050-1215, where the

conflicts of the Gregorian Reform led on to various

twelfth-century wandering heterodox preachers who

denounced clerical marriage, and the sale of offices

(‘Simony’) in particular, and who were in turn succeeded

by the much greater challenges of the Cathar and

Waldensian heresies. In the thirteenth century, the new

mendicants were the Dominicans and Franciscans, and the

great council was the Fourth Lateran of 1215, dominated

by the reforming vision of Pope Innocent III. In the

sixteenth century, we have the Jesuits and Trent.

For medievalists, it is important – and, I hope, useful -

to remind those studying later periods that the middle

ages are not as straightforwardly ‘pre-modern’ or static

as our received Grand Narratives of modernity might

suggest.1 This is perhaps notably urgent in the area of

religion, where recent revisionist work on the medieval

Church (particularly the church in fifteenth-century

1 Marcus Bull, Thinking Medieval (Basingstoke, 2005); John H. Arnold, What is Medieval History? (Cambridge, 2008).

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England) has successfully challenged some older

Protestant assumptions about late medieval ‘decay’ and

‘decline’, but has tended to suggest in its place an

unchanging, untrammelled, static, ‘traditional’ religion,

which cannot help but contrast with the stormy seas of

the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.2 In fact, the

experience of medieval Christianity was in no way static,

and here, as elsewhere, the formation of ‘tradition’ was

always bound up with a mixture of contests and

negotiations between local interests and overarching

authority; thus the brief account of change and reform

given in the first paragraph above.

Adopting a triumphant ‘earlier than thou’ attitude is an

abiding temptation for medievalists, when in conversation

with their early modern colleagues. But more serious

points emerge from some comparisons, and are worth

consideration by historians both sides of the sixteenth-

century fault line: for example, that the medieval

Catholicism which was ‘reformed’ by both Protestant and

Catholic churches was not as simple or static as the

contemporary rhetoric of those reformers might make it

appear; that key elements in both kinds of reformed

Christianities sprang, in part, from medieval

developments (in lay religiosity in particular); and that

the complex conjunctions between parochial communities,

Christian intellectuals, ecclesiastical authorities and

secular powers which lay at the heart of the Counter-2 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars (Yale, 1992).

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Reformation were not without precedent. In this chapter,

I shall look at three aspects of medieval Christianity.

The first is the realm of ideas, including legal ideas;

the second is that of power, both ecclesiastical and

secular; the third is the lived religion of the people.

In noting some medieval counterpoints to early modern

developments, I do not aim to suggest that history

repeats itself, nor to claim that nothing ever really

changes, nor to deny that the period c. 1500-1700 saw

massive change. The aim, rather, is to remind non-

medievalists that the changes which occurred – the

cleavages, fractures and re-formations which Christianity

underwent in the early modern period – did not interpose

themselves with an abrupt or foreign force, but largely

grew from the inheritance of an already-conflicted

Christian past. Europe was not, one might say, smashed

apart by an unheralded satellite descending from the

heavens, but partially (though not by any means wholly)

reshaped by the activity of tectonic forces which had

long grumbled away beneath the surface of medieval

Christendom.

Theology and Law

The canons of the council of Trent dealing with the

essentials of the Catholic faith – the nature of the

sacraments, the role of the clergy – were not new. That,

of course, was their very point. The authority of the

Catholic church explicitly rested not solely upon

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scriptural interpretation, but the accretion of

tradition: the late antique patristic writers glossed,

elaborated and in various ways revised the primitive

church; high medieval theologians, canonists and popes

built then upon those late antique foundations, often in

an attempt to reconcile emergent tensions held within

that legacy. When those at Trent came to affirm Catholic

faith against the protestant ‘heretics’, they did so

through the reassertion of medieval truths. Those

medieval truths had themselves been asserted in similar

texts and not dissimilar contexts in preceding centuries.

Theologies on the nature of Christ were first pounded out

in late antiquity, as the decisions made at the council

of Nicea (325 CE) continued to be debated and denounced

by ‘Christians’ and ‘Heretics’ (these two labels being

particularly fluid in late antiquity; as they were so to

become once again in the sixteenth century). Orthodox

thought on Christ’s presence in the Eucharist was

repeatedly defined and refined in response to ‘heretical’

counter-positions, from the intellectual challenge of

Berengar of Tours in the eleventh century, to the more

diffuse scepticism voiced by first Cathar and then

Lollard heretics in the later middle ages. The position

and role of the priest was necessarily debated by all

heresies, but most particularly reasserted in response to

the Wycliffite and Hussite challenges of the late

fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which wished to open

up sacramental and scriptural authority to the laity.

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My point is not to echo John Foxe and others in depicting

medieval heretics as forerunners of the protestant

Reformation. It is, rather, to note that sixteenth-

century Catholic ecclesiastics, responding to the

challenge of Protestantism, had a legacy of anti-

heretical writing upon which they could and did draw.3

Writing ‘against’ a heretic or heretical position – Against

Jovinian, Against Faustus the Manichaean, Against Heresies to quote

the titles of several of Augustine of Hippo’s treatises –

was an established literary form in medieval Europe.

Orthodoxy had recurrent recourse to heresy as a useful

‘Other’, not only in a general sense of justifying its

own authority, but in the more specific senses of using

the challenge of heresy more closely to define and to

explicate orthodox thought, and be prompted to develop

better tools for the successful dissemination of that

orthodox opinion to the laity. In its theological

elements, Trent thus looks very familiarly medieval,

including in the way it tends to frame and introduce

tenets of faith via scriptural quotation. From the

thirteenth century onward, when a number of compendious

treatises ‘against heretics’ were written and compiled,

Catholic authors realised the utility of challenging

heretics on their own scriptural turf. Whilst making

clear the underpinning assertion that the church did not

depend upon scripture alone, Catholic polemicists were

3 David Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents: Catholic Controversialists 1518-1525 (Minneapolis, 1991).

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nonetheless happy to challenge ‘heretical’ biblical

exegesis quote for quote, and to proffer useful compendia

of scriptural quotations for use in debates with

heretics.

There had been reforming councils well before Trent – the

Third Lateran (1179) and Fourth Lateran (1215) being the

most important examples – and in the latter in

particular, we see a familiar process: the threat of

heresy prompted a detailed statement of Catholic faith

(Firmiter credimus, the opening canon of Lateran IV) and, as

importantly, new tools for the parochial dissemination of

that faith: the establishment of secure parochial

benefices, designed to ensure that a local priest will

regularly instruct his flock, and hear confession at

least once – and more ideally three times – a year. Trent

goes into very much more detail than preceding church

councils on the specifics of the faith. But this is not

because the medieval Church was not concerned with such

details. The difference depends, rather, on contrasting

systems of authority. Even as powerful a pope as Innocent

III (r.1199-1216) assumed that Catholic truth was spread

across an inherited and ongoing system of intellectual

endeavour, rather than gathered only and specifically

into the grasp of the papal curia. Firmiter credimus set out

the bare essentials; but the elaboration beyond those

essentials was (Innocent knew) in constant circulation

across Europe via canon law collections, theological

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summae, and - following the prompt which Lateran IV gave

to the cura animarum in the parish - practical treatises on

preaching, confession, and the essentials of the faith

(the seven sacraments, the seven sins and seven virtues,

the ten commandments, the works of mercy, the orders of

the church, and so forth). Trent, from a medieval

perspective, differs in that, at that moment in time, the

distributed sense of authority appears no longer to be

trusted. Only by gathering together in one place such a

huge collection of theologians, archbishops and others,

under the direct aegis of the papacy, could Catholic

truth be sufficiently forcefully reasserted.

Not that medieval thought was univocal and uncontested. I

have already mentioned heresy, some of which (Berengar of

Tours, Joachim of Fiore, John Wyclif) arose in

intellectual contexts. Theological thought was to some

degree policed. In the early twelfth-century, certain of

Peter Abelard’s works were prosecuted for heresy. When

the great European universities were established in the

thirteenth century, systems for censuring heretical

thought were developed.4 Most famously, in 1277, the

University of Paris forbade the teaching of elements of

Aristotelian thought which were seen as inimical to a

Christian view of creation. But there is a tendency to

assume that control was tighter and more effective than

the evidence suggests. Most of Abelard’s works still

4 J. M. M. H. Thijssen, Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200-1400 (Philadelphia, 1998).

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circulated long after his death, and Joachite belief in

the Apocalypse had considerable late medieval influence.

Various of Wyclif’s propositions were condemned by the

papacy in 1377, but Wyclif himself retired then to a

rural parish, whence he continued to disseminate ever

more radical thought until his death in 1384. Aristotle

remained ‘the Philosopher’ to all late medieval

theologians and thinkers, exercising a massive influence

not only via Thomas Aquinas’s attempts at a synthesis

between ancient philosophy and Christian revelation, but

also in more specific works on political philosophy, what

we might call ‘scientific’ works, and as one ‘authority’

amongst others regularly cited by the writers of

theological treatises. Works might be censured, and

sometimes censored, but the implications of this in a

manuscript culture were not clear-cut; works seen as

problematic or even straightforwardly heretical could

still be found in monastic libraries, posing as

‘anonymous’ tracts, or ascribed to different authors, or

simply placed on shelves labelled ‘superstitiones’.5 Less

dramatically, medieval universities were capable of

entertaining radical discussion, particularly through the

vehicle of so-called Quodlibetal (‘What you will’)

questions, posed for debate as a regular part of

university training.6 The sixteenth-century rejection of

5 K. Kerby-Fulton, Books Under Suspicion: Censorship and Tolerance of Revelatory Writing in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame, 2006).6 In general, see M. Asztalos, ‘The Faculty of Theology’, in H. de Ridder-Symoens, ed., A History of the University in Europe, volume I: The University in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1992), pp. 409-41.

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the radicalism of Luther and others makes early modern

Catholicism appear more intellectually hidebound and

nervous than much of its medieval inheritance.

Again, it was the distributed nature of authority that

allowed a degree of heterogeneity and relative autonomy

to medieval thinkers. University theologians were subject

to the authority of their institution, but those

institutions often repelled attempts by outside

ecclesiastical or secular authorities to intervene (much

as a monastery might reject the claim of the local bishop

to have rights of visitation). The Franciscan and

Dominican orders could protect their members from outside

challenge – as indeed in an earlier century Peter the

Venerable had partially protected Peter Abelard from

Bernard of Clairvaux’s attacks. The papacy could

sometimes be invoked as an arbiter of orthodox belief,

but the resolution of such disputes was more often

conducted at a national or even diocesan level. Even when

papally-appointed inquisitors were in operation (a

subject to which we will return below), the specifics of

their task and their assessments were rarely referred

back to the papacy; inquisitors drew, rather, upon the

resources of their orders and the skein of canon law and

theology which was shared by the litterati across

Christendom.

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It is worth considering canon law in a bit more detail.

As with theology (much of which, of course, was included

in canon law) the body of canon law rested upon

accumulated layers of past statements and decisions, made

by popes, church councils, and patristic authorities.

These were, unsurprisingly, sometimes discordant; and it

was for that reason that the canonist (or more likely,

two succeeding canonists) known as ‘Gratian’ compiled the

great work known as the Decretum in the later twelfth

century. Whilst there had been earlier such compilations,

Gratian's was particularly useful in its attempts to

provide an authoritative resolution to moments of

canonical contradiction, and to arrange these issues

under various coherent ‘questions’, such as ‘On

marriage’. In the thirteenth century, to the Decretum was

added the Liber extra, a further compilation of papal

decrees, many concerning the prosecution of heresy and

the maintenance of orthodoxy (and it is these two

together which are known as the Corpus iuris canonici). This

was then the bedrock of canon law, circulated across

Europe, for the later middle ages.7 Copies of the full

text were swiftly in very wide circulation and, as

importantly, canonists composed treatises explicating

various elements of canon law and its implementation.

Thus the canon law in certain essential areas – how to

handle marriage disputes, for example – could be readily

and fairly uniformly implemented within all Christendom.

7 J. A. Brundage, The Medieval Origins of the Legal Profession: Canonists, Civilians and Courts (Chicago, 2010), particularly pp. 96-105 on Gratian.

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For example, an essential principle of canon law on

marriage was the mutual consent of both groom and bride,

and many late medieval disputes around marriage contracts

hinged on precisely this issue (if only paying lip

service to it).8 Canon law had an ‘extra-juridical’

dissemination also, via parochial preaching and

instruction. Synods and councils emphasized canonical

decrees in particular areas, and disseminated these

within diocesan structures; there is some later medieval

evidence that priests, attending synods, made their own

copies of the canons on particular issues. The kinds of

pastoral works of instruction prompted by Lateran IV also

drew explicitly upon the Corpus iuris. So the issue of

mutual consent to marry, for example, would be known not

only within the specific legal context of an Episcopal

audience court, but disseminated to parishioners via

Sunday preaching.9

In terms of understanding the events of the sixteenth

century, it is essential – as various other historians

have previously emphasized - to consider the role of the

Conciliar movement in the fifteenth century.10 The council

of Constance was called in 1414, prompted by the Holy

Roman Emperor Sigismund, in an effort to deal with the

ongoing crisis of the Great Schism (by this stage there

8 S. McSheffrey. Marriage, Sex and Civic Culture in Late Medieval London (Philadelphia, 2006).9 D. L. d’Avray, Medieval Marriage: Symbolism and Society (Oxford, 2005).10 S. Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250-1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of late Medieval and Reformation Europe (New Haven, 1980).

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were three competing ‘popes’, elected by competing bodies

of cardinals) and the war with the Hussite heretics in

Bohemia. The key development of Constance and later

councils was to claim that papal authority was itself

subject to canon law; and hence that, when papal

authority had broken down, a canonically constituted

collective body such as the council could itself make

authoritative decisions - including deposing the various

popes, and sending Jan Hus to the stake. My interest here

is not in the abstract theories of power propounded in

these contexts, which are perhaps in any case taken too

much at face value by intellectual historians. In the

context of this chapter the point, rather, is two-fold.

First, that the conciliar movement could bring itself

into being speaks to the distributed nature of medieval

authority that I have discussed above: that a sprawling

inheritance of canon law, theology and intellectual

activity existed independently of whomever sat upon the

papal throne, and could be drawn upon in such moments of

crisis. Second, it is at Constance that we find for the

first time medieval intellectuals acting en masse, at the

sharp end of real political power. As avatars of

distributed authority, at Constance they managed cohere,

and successfully reshape the ecclesio-political

landscape. Although the spectre of conciliar authority

overthrowing papal supremacy was a great complication for

Trent, there is in Constance nonetheless a clear

foreshadowing of the later council, not only in terms of

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the locus of authority, but also the reformist interests

of those involved.11 It is here that the modern Catholic

historiographical claim to see Trent as part of an

ongoing process of late medieval Catholic reform, rather

than simply a reaction to the Protestant challenge, is

partly justified. The council of Constance, and the

councils which came after, was concerned with church

reform at the highest levels – sorting out the mess of

the competing papacies. But the thinkers and churchmen

involved with Constance were also concerned with ‘reform’

in a much broader sense. An exemplary figure is Jean

Gerson (1363-1429), chancellor of the University of

Paris, and a key actor at Constance. His theological

interests stretched from the most abstract of

intellectual discussions to the most practical matters of

parochial care. Gerson wrote Latin treatises on papal

power and the schism, but he also wrote in the French

vernacular, and preached to popular audiences. In a

letter written to Pierre d’Ailly in 1400, Gerson listed

various reforms which he thought the theology faculty

needed to undertake; but also suggested that, just as the

medical faculty had supplied a ‘little treatise’ to

instruct people during times of plague, the theology

faculty should produce ‘another little treatise on the

principle points of our religion, and especially on the

precepts, to instruct the simple, who are rarely or never11 N. H. Minnich, ‘The Changing Status of Theologians in the General Councils of the West : Pisa (1409) to Trent (1545-63)’, in N. H. Minnich, Councils of the Catholic Reformation: Pisa I (1409) to Trent (1545-63) (Aldershot, 2008), chapter IV.

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at a sermon’.12 Reformatio in capite et in membris, as various of

the conciliar theologians later put it.

Power(s)

In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII issued the bull Unam sanctam,

in which he proclaimed that all temporal authority was

subject to the power of the papacy, and concluded with

the words ‘We declare, we proclaim, we define that it is

absolutely necessary for salvation that every human

creature be subject to the Roman Pontiff’. As an idea,

this is the undoubted pinnacle of papal power; and as an

idea it has had a long afterlife, mostly in a negative

sense, as something which much later political theory

sought to demolish (a process begun in the early

fourteenth century, by William of Ockham and Marsilius of

Padua). But the real point here is the hollowness of

Boniface’s claims. Unam sanctam was issued at a crisis

point in his dispute with Philip IV of France; the limits

of the pope’s actual power, even within the

ecclesiastical sphere, are illustrated by the fact that,

of the French bishops who had been summoned to the

council at which the bull was issued, only half actually

turned up. A year later Philip’s forces briefly took

Boniface prisoner in the papal palace at Anagni,

preparatory to forcing his resignation at a general

12 Jean Gerson, Oeuvres Completes, ed. P. Glorieux (10 vols. Paris, 1960-1973), vol. 2, p. 28 (letter 3).

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council convened under French control; he escaped this

fate by chance, dying of fever in October 1303.

Medieval potentates, secular and ecclesiastical, made

grand claims for their powers. But the realities of power

were always more complex. Philip IV himself, despite his

ability to bring the church to heel within France, and to

seize the wealth of the Templars and the Jews, could not

always extract taxes from towns in southern France. He

put considerable efforts into circulating anti-Boniface

propaganda during his dispute with the papacy, an

indication that his own abilities to act might come under

restraint from something like ‘popular opinion’.13 There

was a gap, in other words, between claims and reality.

And power was always to some extent performative – the

ability to act and intervene stood or fell on the actual

success of any particular intervention, and the

willingness or otherwise of a wider ‘audience’ to agree

that what they had seen enacted did indeed constitute due

authority.14 One role of international importance that the

papacy sometimes played was that of peacemaker,

negotiating treaties between warring kingdoms, or

bolstering the claims of one side by excommunicating the

13 S. Menache, The Vox Dei: Communication in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 1990).14 On the symbolic nature of papal power, see Agostino Paravicini Bagliani, The Pope’s Body, trans. D. S. Peterson (Chicago, 2000); Il Poteredel Papa: Corporeita, autorappresentazione, simboli (Tavarnuzze, 2009). A useful discussion of theories of power, in the context of the Great Schism, is David Zachariah Flanagin, ‘Extra ecclesiam salus non est – sed quae ecclesia? Ecclesiology and Authority in the Later Middle Ages’, in Joëlle Rollo-Koster and Thomas M. Izbicki, eds, A Companion to the Great Western Schism (1378-1417) (Leiden, 2009), pp. 333-74.

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other. Boniface VIII in fact played such a role in 1298,

mediating between Philip IV of France and Edward II of

England; although – in further illustration of the

‘performative’ aspect - Philip in fact refused to

recognise Boniface as having any jurisdictional authority in

the matter, accepting him as a mediator only in a

personal capacity.

It is also of course worth remembering the simple

practicalities of power, and the unexpected consequences

of decisions. Each major crusade was set in motion by a

pope, usually particularly by proclaiming the scale of

indulgence for sins by which participation would be

rewarded. Popes displayed some elements of strategy:

deciding whether to focus the initial call on nobles

rather than royals, or vice versa; involving papal

legates in a more or less hands on fashion. But the

rather varied outcomes of crusade were not in papal

control, and perhaps rather rarely corresponded to

anything resembling ‘papal policy’. Following Urban II’s

initial call to crusade in 1095, probably the next

clearest example of the papacy deciding on a change of

direction was the launch of the Albigensian Crusade in

southern France in 1209. The initial call was directed

toward the French king (who effectively ignored it), the

southern French nobility (who also mostly ignored it,

perhaps uncertain as to what it would mean to crusade

against their neighbours) and the northern French

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nobility (who embraced it rapaciously). Bloody violence

ensued, unevenly, across the following two decades, until

finally Louis VIII intervened and subjugated the south; a

political victory, but not in the first instance a

spiritual one, as the dualist heretics who had been the

original target survived in Languedoc for some decades

more.

Even within the purely religious sphere, the idea of

papal plenitudo potestatis can obscure the actual processes of

power. By the thirteenth century, the papacy had managed

to establish a successful mechanism for extracting

regular revenue from all of Christendom. But this

depended in large part on the financial interests of each

intermediary party - priest, bishop - taking their

portion; it was a more distributed and localised system

than a simple top-down extraction of wealth, and

increases to the amount or nature of what was exacted

could frequently lead to tithe disputes. The papacy was,

of course, the most authoritative voice (though not, as I

have indicated above, the only voice) in spiritual

matters. But as recent historians of the papal curia have

been emphasizing, the production of papal bulls and

decrees was very rarely directed simply by abstract papal

‘policy’ or interests; the dispositive mode of Unam

sanctam, for example, is the exception and not the rule.

Most papal letters were written in response to petitions,

and thus the direction of ongoing canon law was reactive

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as much as directive.15 By the late middle ages, it is

arguably in its petitionary mode that the papacy wielded

greatest power. By the fourteenth century, the papal

penitentiary was drawing petitions in great numbers from

across Europe. The archival sources have only relatively

recently been opened up for study, and the German

material has thus far received greatest attention.16 The

majority of cases involved people born out of wedlock

asking to be legitimized, or for the resolution of

marriage disputes, though a few are more dramatic, asking

forgiveness for unusual sexual sins or violent acts. The

scale of business which came before the penitentiary is

considerable: for example, between 1449 and 1464 (during

the pontificates of Nicholas V, Calixtus III and Pius II)

there were 2,430 petitions from German-speaking people to

the curia.17 In this sense, the pope - as a practical,

legal intercessor – did wield very considerable power

across all Europe; but his was a power dependent upon

‘bottom-up’ demand as much as ‘top-down’ imposition.

15 B. Bombi, 'Celestine III and the Conversion of the Heathen on the Baltic Frontier' in J. Doran and D.J. Smith, eds, Pope Celestine III (1191-1198): Diplomat and Pastor (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 149-150; A. Duggan, 'De consultationibus. The Role of Episcopal Consultation in the Shaping of canon Law in the Twelfth Century', in B. Brasington and K.C. Cushing,eds, Bishops, Texts and the Use of Canon Law around 1000 (Aldershot, 2008), pp. 191-214.16 L. Schmugge et al, eds, Repertorium poenitentiariae Germanicum (6 vols. Tübingen, 1998-).17 Kirsi Salonen and Christian Krotzl, eds, The Roman Curia, the Apostolic Penitentiary and the Partes in the Later Middle Ages, Acta Instituti Romani Finlandiae 28 (Rome, 2003), p. 174.

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What of the power of bishops? In the early middle ages,

ecclesiastical power resided more obviously with bishops

and major monasteries than with the papacy; by the

thirteenth century, the episcopate was much more clearly

subordinate. But bishops retained considerable local

power, not least because in many European cities they

continued to hold a secular position of lordship (though

this in itself often led to disputes about jurisdiction

and income). In terms of religious policy, bishops could

act together at regional councils to decide local

matters; thus whilst Gratian’s Decretum provided the

rationalised framework for canon law, the regulation of

liturgical parochial practice was much more to do with

conciliar legislation. There were ideals and models

shared across and between councils, and different bishops

would for example reissue statutes from earlier

incumbents or from other regions. But some degree of

local variation would also enter into such texts. For

example, in southern France in the later thirteenth

century, the injunction of the Fourth Lateran council to

attend annual confession was strengthened by local

episcopal mandates, which required the parish priest to

record in writing the names of all those who attended

confession and communion, and any who did not.18

In terms of the governance of the parish, the main

mechanisms were the archdeaconal courts and Episcopal

18 J. H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, 2001), p. 37.

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visitations. The pastoral and legal work of archdeacons

is not easily visible to us now, as very few of their

records survive, though where they were active, they

appear often to have been the first point of contact with

the canon legal system, in terms of disciplining the

laity and resolving disputes around marriage and the

like.19 Episcopal visitations, which in theory took place

throughout the diocese on a three year cycle,

incorporated similar matters, as well as checking up on

the moral behaviour of the clergy, the suitability of the

church fabric, and allowing the bishop to bestow the

tonsure on those wishing to enter minor orders. Episcopal

archives for the later middle ages appear to have been

more selective in what they kept for posterity than would

be the case in the early modern period, and for this

reason we again generally do not have as full a record of

Episcopal visitations as we might wish (particularly in

England); but, against the assumptions of an earlier

historiography, this does not necessarily mean that the

late medieval clergy were in fact derelict in their duty.

In some areas – the diocese of Barcelona most notably –

we find a rich vein of material, throughout the

fourteenth century; and survivals elsewhere suggest that

the practice was more common than the extant records

would immediately suggest. The point here is one of

continuity: parochial visitations were a key part of

19 I. Forrest, ‘The Archive of the Official of Stow and the “Machinery” of Church Government in the Late Thirteenth Century’, Historical Research 84 (2011): pp. 1-13

22

ecclesiastical governance in the early modern period, but

with rather richer surviving records. A change in the

archive does not, however, necessarily signal a change in

practice, and late medieval visitations give clear albeit

fleeting glimpses of bishops checking on the suitability

of the parish clergy to their task; the upkeep of the

parish church, its ornaments, and the liturgical books;

and whether the people of the parish were regularly

attending church, and had made annual confession and

communion.

The sharpest end of this kind of church discipline was,

of course, the Inquisition. Or perhaps I should write

‘inquisitors’ – for although medieval inquisition into

heretical depravity was, by the later thirteenth century,

a quite well organised and interconnected process, there

was never a central ‘Holy Office’, and the legal process

of inquisition was conducted on a specific and in some

ways limited basis.20 Inquisitors investigated on the

basis of pre-existent public rumour – fama – for a

particular area. In the mid thirteenth century, in the

aftermath of the Albigensian crusade, this was taken

quite broadly: the whole of southern France was

essentially ‘suspect’, and inquisitions were very

geographically wide-ranging affairs. Indeed, surviving

records contain the depositions of around 8000 people

20 R. Kieckhefer, ‘The Office of Inquisition and Medieval Heresy: The Transition from Personal to Institutional Jurisdiction’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 46 (1995): pp. 36-61.

23

questioned in the 1240s and 1250s in southern France; and

it is clear that we now have only a smallish portion of

the original number of inquisitorial registers. By the

end of the thirteenth century, however, inquisitions

tended to be much more tightly focussed, questioning tens

or a few hundred people where there was more clearly

specific evidence that heretics had been active. The power

wielded by inquisitors could be considerable: if found

guilty of relapsing into heresy, or if obstinate in

refusing to recant, one could be burnt (although, as with

the later Spanish inquisition and Roman Holy Office,

those executed were a small proportion of the whole).

Many people were imprisoned, sent on lengthy pilgrimages,

and forced to wear yellow badges which identified their

transgressions. At the same time, however, for their

judgments to be followed, inquisitors were dependent upon

the support of local secular powers - which was not

always forthcoming. Dominican inquisitors were forcibly

ejected from several southern French towns at different

points during the thirteenth century, and the tensions of

Italian civic politics often made their lives rather

complex there also.21 Whether medieval inquisition was

‘better’ or ‘worse’ than the Spanish Inquisition and the

Holy Office is almost impossible to say. The later

Inquisitions drew directly upon the legal procedures

developed by medieval inquisitors, and continued to use

the handbooks written by Bernard Gui (c. 1325) and

21 J. B. Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline and Resistance in Medieval Languedoc (Ithaca, 1998).

24

Nicholas Eymerich (c. 1376). In terms of numbers of

people questioned by inquisitors, the mid thirteenth

century sees a high point followed by a marked fall in

numbers; similar or higher peaks are reached again in

Spain in the sixteenth century, but as recent work on the

early modern tribunals has emphasized, inquisitorial

power in practice could still be more complex and more

compromised than the Black Legend would have it.

We have a tendency to expect to see a linear progression

in power, from lesser to greater or vice versa, across

the medieval to early modern periods. But perhaps a

better approach would be to examine different, but

sometimes recurrent, agglomerations of power across time.

As I have mentioned at several points above, a key issue

is when, in what ways and in what circumstances, does

secular power conjoin with ecclesiastical power? To put

it most bluntly, under what circumstances does the state

decide to support the disciplinary project of the church?

One could make a strong case for saying that the very

closest connections were in the eighth and ninth

centuries, as the Carolingian Empire encouraged and

disseminated a markedly uniform programme of

ecclesiastical reform, which included an interest in the

religious practices of the laity; although, it should

then be noted, the level of detail of that interest was not

so great as in later times. At certain moments, the

secular state had a particular interest in religious

25

conformity, because it had come to associate heterodoxy

with political sedition. One might see something like

this in late medieval Spain, following the massed

conversion of the Jews; and one certainly sees it in

Lancastrian England, where the spectre of Wycliffite

‘Lollardy’ was clearly imagined to threaten the political

stability of the realm. One of the most notable aspects

for medievalists of the early modern churches (both

Protestant and Catholic) is their national character, and

the state-sanctioned violence that sometimes accompanied

confessionalization. But whilst this is clearly of a

different order and recurrence in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, it is not without some medieval

precedent – most notably in Bohemia, where the Hussite

heresy (which successfully fought off a series of

crusades launched against it) had close associations with

a national Czech identity, against a German-speaking

aristocracy. And more broadly, one of the longest-felt

effects of the Great Schism had been the association of

different nations with different popes – encouraging both

France and England (backing different horses, of course)

to develop stronger feelings of having a ‘national’

church.

The People

In early fourteenth-century Languedoc, a stonemason

called Arnaud de Savinhan found himself somewhat

unexpectedly in deep trouble.22 His neighbours had been 22 Arnold, Inquisition and Power, pp. 167-73.

26

discussing an apocalyptic prophecy, but Arnaud told them

that he did not believe it - 'the world had never begun

and would never end, but always is and will be, and while

we live and die, it always was and will be, and there is

no other world but the present one', he allegedly

declared. Hauled up before the inquisitor Jacques

Fournier (bishop of Pamiers, later to become Pope

Benedict XII) Arnaud was questioned on his beliefs. He

attempted to defend himself in various ways: that he had

been joking, that he'd been misunderstood, that he rarely

managed to stay to hear the sermon on a Sunday because of

the pressures of work and was therefore ignorant. Asked

who had taught him the beliefs, he said that:

he taught himself letters, namely the seven

psalms, a little of the Psalter, the fifteen

signs of Judgment, the Credo, the Paternoster,

the Ave Maria, and from these he believed that

all bodies returned to nothing after judgment,

and, as he said, he had no other teacher.

Several times sentenced to wear the yellow crosses which

marked out his transgression, and several times failing

properly to obey, he eventually spent six years in strict

imprisonment, being eventually released from his chains

in 1329.

The discovery by those in spiritual authority that some

of the laity - perhaps particularly those in very rural

areas - did not believe quite as they were supposed to is

27

another recurrent historical phenomenon. Early medieval

writers decried rural 'superstitions', just as did

Tridentine reformers, and twentieth-century Catholics in

the build up to Vatican II. Think not only of A. N.

Galpern's 'religions' (plural) of the people in

sixteenth-century France, or of the heretical miller

Menocchio, but also of Carlo Levi's Christ Stopped at Eboli

(1945). Not many leading medieval churchmen had quite so

close an encounter as Jacques Fournier did with heterodox

lay belief, but the spectre of ignorance, confusion and

stubborn persistence in unbelief was always shocking when

brought into public view. The hope of reformers of every

period was that one could set the laity on an ever-

ascending path. But in reality, there were always those

who did not believe as they ought, often in more or less

blissful ignorance of their own heterodoxy. Not that

there was no change over time: part of the issue is

precisely that expectations about what the laity should

believe did change; and thus the ways in which one could

fail similarly ascended. Accompanying this is a change in

how authorities saw the seriousness of such lapses, and

how methodically or otherwise they searched them out.

Arnaud de Savinhan was essentially unlucky, giving voice

to an unorthodox opinion in a place and time when

inquisitors were already searching actively for Cathar

heretics. But by the fifteenth century, some very

familiar and long-standing misbeliefs were being taken as

much more serious moral lapses: for example, the tendency

28

to deal with folk medicine as serious maleficia (imagining

it to have a possible demonic element), and the shift in

seeing blasphemy as not simply a bad habit but a

punishable crime.

Reformers, confronted with such phenomena, tend usually

to diagnose a lack of education: what the laity need is

better instruction, more preaching, more effective means

of catechizing (as we have heard from Jean Gerson, and as

we later hear from the Jesuits and others). Obviously

there is something to this, and a key shift from medieval

to Counter-Reformation is surely the much greater effort

placed into diocesan training and education. But it is

possible to take the reformers' rhetoric too much at face

value. Look at what else Arnaud de Savinhan tells us,

alongside his more unusual beliefs: that there was

regular Sunday preaching in his rural parish, that his

neighbours were in the habit of discussing religious

issues, and that he himself knew not only the Ave Maria,

Credo and Paternoster prayer but also some psalms and a

little theology (even if misunderstood). Knowledge of the

Ave, Credo and Paternoster had long been enjoined upon

all Christian souls, and by the thirteenth century

ecclesiastical councils mandated several different routes

by which these tenets of faith could be learned: from

parents and godparents, from parochial and mendicant

preaching, and by the priest checking up on each

29

parishioner once a year when they came to make confession

and receive communion.23

Such knowledge was understood to be a base line, upon

which much more could be built. For anglophone

historians, our sense of late medieval piety and

religious knowledge is particularly distorted by the lens

of the Henrician Reformation, and the earlier legislation

directed against Lollardy in the fifteenth century. These

have tended to leave us with the idea that the medieval

church vehemently fought off any vernacular religious

instruction, and was uniformly hostile to educating the

laity in the 'mysteries' of the faith. In a broader

European context, the picture is very much more complex.

There was an abundance of vernacular literature on

religious topics written for the laity, including the

bible, even in late medieval England. The circulation of

such literature could not be anything like as great as

with the mature print culture of the seventeenth century;

but as various recent historians have argued,

particularly in France and Italy, there was a huge rise

in manuscript reproduction in the fifteenth century,

rendered relatively cheap by the increased production of

paper.24 Such materials circulated mainly in urban

contexts, and mainly among the upper ranks of the 23 N. Tanner and S. Watson, 'The Least of the Laity: the Minimum Requirements for a Medieval Christian', Journal of Medieval History 32 (2006): pp. 395-423.24 Daniel Hobbins, Authorship and Publicity before Print: Jean Gerson and the Transformation of Late Medieval Learning (Philadelphia, 2009), particularly pp. 8-10.

30

bourgeois; but circulate they nonetheless did, and in a

culture where every text was experienced aurally more

often than textually, their audiences may have been

fairly considerable. Some historians have also argued

that the circulation of model sermons (emanating

particularly from the university of Paris) was of such a

scale as to form a kind of 'mass media' carrying a pretty

uniform message.25 Whilst it is the case that medieval lay

religiosity was more essentially a matter of devout

activity than internal reflection, it is nonetheless also

true that some late medieval religious literature

fostered modes of interiorized, self-reflective piety. We

are perhaps in danger here of slipping into 'earlier than

thou' territory. The point is, however, that the further

reforms of the sixteenth century built upon these

foundations, and did not start from a blank slate.

In any case, it was never the case that the only prompt

to lay piety came from top-down 'reform'. At various

points across time we see considerable enthusiasm amongst

the ordinary laity for the apostolic example set by new

religious groups, and a few lay people developing their

own models of devotion and piety, as with the quasi-

monastic beguine communities of fourteenth-century

Flanders, or the late medieval brethren of the 'Common

Life' who followed the devotio moderna. These were special

and relatively extreme cases; but there was clearly a

25 D. L. d'Avray, Medieval Marriage Sermons: Mass Communication in a Culture without Print (Oxford, 2001).

31

much broader lay appeal to at least intermittent acts of

similar devotion, as we see with the mass pilgrimage

movements such as the Bianchi of 1399. At a parish level,

medievalists have been working hard to challenge the

received image of decline and alienation received from a

Protestant historiography, asserting in its place the

vibrancy and lay involvement in parochial religion. There

surely are changes in lay Catholic devotion between the

late fourteenth and early seventeenth centuries, but some

apparent differences may rest more upon the nature of

surviving records than an absolute shift. Take religious

guilds and confraternities, for which we have very

abundant evidence in the early modern period, including

regular evidence for membership and expenditure. A

straight comparison with the surviving medieval material

cannot help but suggest a very considerable increase. But

there was no regular prompt to medieval confraternities

to make or archive written records: the patchy

information we have in much of Europe was frequently the

product of a particular moment of enquiry (as in England

in 1388, when the crown demanded that major gilds provide

evidence of their purposes and composition) or chance

survival. Passing references in other kinds of records

(wills, charters, notarial records) suggest that

collective associations, dedicated to alms-giving and

pious practices (such as sustaining a lamp to a

particular saint), were extremely common from a very

32

early period.26 How much change there was, from medieval

to early modern, is perhaps a more complex question than

previously assumed.

A final issue is that of religious identity, which

obviously takes on a different complexity and importance

once one is aware that there are choices available

between 'Catholic' and 'Protestant'. Again, however,

there are at least foreshadows of this in the medieval

period. On a slightly marginal scale, one can think of

the experience of those who belonged to heretical groups,

aware that their choice of faith divided them from their

neighbours; for example, the Waldensian communities who

lived and intermarried in remote villages in Piedmont in

the fifteenth century, largely attempting to keep

themselves to themselves. I mentioned above the prompt

which the Great Schism (and the Hussite heresy) gave to

figuring religious identity in terms of national

allegiances. But most broadly, there was also the

European-wide experience of thinking of oneself as

'Christian' in both in terms of not being Jewish or

Moslem, and in terms of not being grossly sinful. Those

whose bad behaviour - gambling, swearing, drinking - grew

to extremes were censured by their neighbours as 'not

good Christians' (something we can see particularly via

the records of episcopal visitation). Being 'not Jewish'

in late medieval England was a rather abstract (though

26 D. Postles, 'Lamps, Lights and Layfolk: "Popular" Devotion before the Black Death', Journal of Medieval History 25 (1999): pp. 97-114.

33

probably still common) kind of thought, given the

expulsion of 1290. But around the Mediterranean basin,

the presence of large Jewish communities, and the

mercantile links with Arab traders in the middle east,

made the sense of religious difference rather more

quotidian. Sometimes the apprehension of difference led

to violence; but sometimes also to some voicing of

toleration - that each would be saved 'by his own law'.

In Conclusion

It is obviously impossible in one brief chapter to give a

satisfactory account of the medieval church. My aim has

been simply to suggest areas where the grounds of

comparison between the medieval and the early modern

could be reassessed. In order to facilitate such

comparisons, the main challenge facing historians is to

abandon ideas about 'better' or 'worse' religious forms

(ideas which we have inherited from the polemicists on

both sides of both protestant and catholic reformations)

and instead to look more clearly at degrees of difference

and similarity. Medievalists and early modernists have

shared interests in anthropological tools by which we

might analyse what constitutes 'religion' in a given time

and place; in the inter-relations between religion and

power for our respective periods; and in the ways in

which religion operates in conjunction with other

cultural aspects such as literacy, gender, and identity.

A shared conversation - where Trent forms a key fulcrum

34

rather than a point of dislocation - is both possible and

desirable.

Bibliography for further study

John H. Arnold, Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe (London:

Bloomsbury, 2005)

Mark D. Bailey, Battling Demons: Witchcraft, Heresy and Reform in the

late Middle Ages (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State

University Press, 2003)

Robert L. Benson and Giles Constable, eds, Renaissance and

Renewal in the Twelfth Century (Harvard: Harvard University

Press, 1982)

Lina Bolzoni, The Web of Images: Vernacular Preaching from its Origins

to Saint Bernardino of Siena (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004)

Daniel Bornstein, The Bianchi of 1399: Popular Devotion in Late

Medieval Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993)

Robert Brentano, The Two Churches: England and Italy in the Thirteenth

Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988)

James A. Brundage, Medieval Canon Law (Harlow: Longman, 1995)

Jennifer Bryan, Looking Inward: Devotional Reading and the Private Self

in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

Christine Caldwell Ames, Righteous Persecution: Inquisition,

Dominicans and Christianity in the Middle Ages (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

Esther Cohen, The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010)

35

Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England

1400-1580, 2nd edn (Yale: Yale University Press, 2005)

Paul Freedman, The Diocese of Vic: Tradition and Regeneration in

Medieval Catalonia (New Brunswick NJ: Rutgers University

Press, 1983)

Katherine L. French, The People of the Parish: Community Life in a

Late Medieval English Diocese (Philadelphia: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2000)

David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in

the Middle Ages (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996)

Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith, eds, The

Cambridge History of Christianity vol. III: Early Medieval Christianities, c.600-

c.1100 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008)

Miri Rubin and Walter Simons, eds, The Cambridge History of

Christianity vol. IV: Christianity in Western Europe c. 1100-c.1500

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009)

Roberto Rusconi, L'ordine dei peccati: La confessione tra Medioevo ed

età moderna (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2002)

Jean-Claude Schmitt, Ghosts in the Middle Ages: The Living and the

Dead in Medieval Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,

1998)

Augustine Thompson, Cities of God: The Religion of the Italian

Communes, 1125-1325 (University Park PA: Pennsylvania State

University Press, 2005)

André Vauchez, The Laity in the Middle Ages: Religious Beliefs and

Devotional Practices (Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press,

1997)

36

Catherine Vincent, Les confréries médiévales dans le royaume de

France, XIIIe - XVe siècles (Paris: Albin Michel, 1994)