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 Nella prima edizione (2001) pp. 308-326

Abstract

A modern History of Medieval Heresy, reduced to the back of a large postage stamp, says this. Between about 1000 and 1050 there are a scatter of reports of heresy in France, north-western Italy, Germany and perhaps Hungary, followed by silence for about fifty years – a period when the reforming Gregorian papacy may have sucked into itself whatever radicalism may have been around. Reports of heresy begin again shortly after 1100 and increase in number, and heresy shows its importance by engaging the attention of the greatest churchmen of the period, Peter the Venerable and St Bernard of Clairvaux, and of a steady sequence of Church councils. From the 1160s onwards there is a lot of evidence of heretics called Cathars, both in Italy and in Languedoc, whose city Albi gave them one of their names, Albigensians, while in the 1170s a layman called Valdes started a movement which was condemned in 1184 and acquired a name from him, Valdenses, Waldensians. The Cathars and the Waldensians were the major heretical movements of the central Middle Ages, spreading widely and in large numbers, and repression of heresy, particularly Catharism, in Languedoc brought about the launching of a crusade in 1209 and the founding of the inquisition in the 1230s. While inquisitors had broken Italian and Languedocian Catharism by around 1320, the Waldensians were more succcessful, surviving in many areas until around 1400, and then in the mountains between Piedmont and Dauphiné until the the sixteenth century, when they were swallowed up by the Reform, although they kept their name. In the preceding century the centre stage of the story had been occupied by national heresies inspired respectively by the Oxford master John Wyclif and the Prague master Jan Hus, English Lollardy and Czech Hussitism, both of them the last significant new movements before the Reformation, and constituting together a sort of pre-reform.