Peter Biller & L J Sackville 
Inquisition and Knowledge, 1200-1700 [EPUB ebook] 

Essays considering how information could be used and abused in the service of heresy and inquisition.


The collection, curation, and manipulation of knowledge were fundamental to the operation of inquisition. Its coercive power rested on its ability to control information and to produce authoritative discourses from it – a fact not lost on contemporaries, or on later commentators. Understanding that relationship between inquisition and knowledge has been one of the principal drivers of its long historiography. Inquisitors and their historians have always been preoccupied with the process by which information was gathered and recirculated as knowledge. The tenor of that question has changed over time, but we are still asking how knowledge was made and handed down – to them and to us – and how their sense of what was interesting or useful affected their selection.

This volume approaches the theme by looking at heresy and inquisition in the Middle Ages, and also at how they were seen in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The contributors consider a wide range of medieval texts, including papal bulls, sermons, polemical treatises and records of interrogations, both increasing our knowledge of medieval heresy and inquisition, and at the same time delineating the twisting of knowledge. This polarity continues in the early modern period, when scholars appeared to advance learning by hunting for medieval manuscripts and publishing them, or ensuring their preservation through copying them; but at the same time, as some of the chapters here show, these were proof texts in the service of Catholic or Protestant polemic. As a whole, the collection provides a clear view of – and invites readers’ reflection on – the shading of truth and untruth in medieval and early modern ‘knowledge’ of heresy and inquisition.


Contributors: Jessalynn Lea Bird, Harald Bollbuck, Irene Bueno, Jörg Feuchter, Richard Kieckhefer, Pawel Kras, Adam Poznanski, Luc Racaut, Alessandro Sala, Shelagh Sneddon, Michaela Valente, Reima Välimäki

Table of Content

List of Illustrations

List of Contributors

Acknowledgements


Introduction

Peter Biller and L. J. Sackville



Part I: Medieval

1. Inquisitorial identity and authority in thirteenth-century exegesis and sermons; Jean Halgrin d’Abbeville, Jacques de Vitry and Humbert of Romans

Jessalynn Lea Bird



2. Shaping the image of the heretics: The
narratio in Gregory IX’s letters

Alessandro Sala


3. Nepos of Montauban, assistant to inquisition and defender of the accused

Jörg Feuchter


4. The hunt for the Heresy of the Free Spirit: the 1332 enquiry into the ‘Cowled Nuns’ of Swidnica

Pawel Kras


5. Late medieval heresiography and the categorisation of Eastern Christianity

Irene Bueno


6. The portrayal of the Waldensian Brethren in the
De vita et conversacione (c. 1391-3)

Appendix:
De vita et conversacione: edition and translation of the

Weimar Ms

Reima Välimäki


7. Means of persuasion in medieval anti-heretical texts: the case of Petrus Zwicker’s
Cum dormirent homines

Adam Poznanski


8. Constructing narratives of witchcraft

Richard Kieckhefer



Part II: Early Modern

9. ‘Ut ex vetustis membranis cognosco’: Matthias Flacius Illyricus and his use of inquisition registers and manuals

Harald Bollbuck


10. The ‘Cathars as Protestant’ myth and the formation of heterodox identity in the French Wars of Religion

Luc Racaut


11. The seventeenth-century introductions to medieval inquisition records in Bibliothèque nationale de France, Collection Doat Mss 21-26

Shelagh Sneddon


12. History in the Dominican Convent in Toulouse in 1666 and 1668: Antonin Réginald and Jean de Doat

Appendix: Antonin Réginald,
Chronicon inquisitorum, edition and translation of excerpts, 1240-1340

Peter Biller


13. The Roman Inquisition: between reality and myth

Michaela Valente

About the author

Paweł Kras is Associate Professor at the John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin and Director of the Centre for Medieval Studies in Lublin; his main area of study is the systems of the Inquisition in Medieval Europe.