The Church’s Founder enjoined the life of perfection on all his followers, but the Cathars were unique in describing themselves as perfect or as ‘good men’. In all other forms of Christianity it is an observable fact that the more devout church members are, the more they are conscious of their imperfections and lack of goodness. This suggests that Cathar spirituality was very different from that of the mainline Christian churches, and it is this which I want to investigate here.

The confluence between speculative thought and universities on the one hand and broad-based heretical movements on the other hand was a predominant theme in Bunny Leff’s great and monumental Heresy in the Later Middle Ages, notably in the case of Wyclif, Hus, and the popular propagation of their ideas. The first arm of this theme, university learning, seems to have no place in the history of Catharism. Where are there equivalent Cathar masters? In a university setting we do have Catholic theologians’ discussion of dualism, but is this more than a footnote in the history of Catharism? Take for example the University of Paris, its theology faculty, and the bachelor’s exercise of lecturing on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, where the question of there being one or several principles of things arose in the first distinction of the second book, and take three 1250s commentators. Tackling this question during his bachelor years (1252-6), St Thomas states five arguments in favour of plurality of principles, citing one logical and three natural works of Aristotle. He postpones naming the proponents of plurality until his response. Here he combines Aristotle’s survey of them in the first book of the Metaphysics and the Church’s experience of dualist heresy in a list: early natural philosophers, Empedocles and Pythagoras, and the heresy of the Manichees. Such a sentence commentary, showing us a formal proposition, one among several philosophical dualisms which were being ventilated in the theological schools of Paris, seems remote from the inquisitor’s register through which we see Cathar perfects and their followers living out theological dualism in fortified villages down south in Languedoc.

To honour the scholar whose distinguished contribution to medieval intellectual history has included examination of the early history of Parisian scholarship, I have chosen to examine an aspect of the work of two major teachers and authors in that ‘monde scolaire qui préfigure déjà le monde universitaire de demain’, the school of Notre Dame. The work of Peter Lombard and Peter Cantor makes clear that in the second half of the twelfth century, Judaism was being placed firmly and permanently on the Parisian theological agenda. Peter Lombard (d. 1160) lectured on the Psalms and the Letters of St Paul. His commentaries on these books came quickly to be received as the standard teaching texts in Paris, the magna glossatura replacing, for those books, the glossa ordinaria of Anselm of Laon and his associates. Medieval exegetes held these particular books of the Bible in esteem. For Aquinas, articulating common opinion, they contained ‘almost the whole of theological doctrine’. And thus, it might well be claimed, almost the whole of theological doctrine about Judaism.

The history of teaching and study at the Parisian convents of the mendicant orders has largely been viewed and written as part of the history of the university of Paris. The Parisian doctors of theology at the Dominican, Franciscan, Augustinian, and Carmelite convents, from the time of Bonaventure, Albert, Thomas, and Giles of Rome until the end of the Middle Ages, were regent masters, or professors, at the university, at least for a year or more after inception as masters. And presumably mendicant students sent to Paris for theological study were being sent there for university studies; the brightest of them would be expected to complete the university degree in theology. The connection between the mendicant masters and the intellectual history of the university of Paris in the second half of the thirteenth century is so strong that it is almost impossible to think of these convents except as religious colleges attached to the university of Paris.

The investigation at Avignon of Ockham‘s suspected errors in the mid 1320s, the canonization by John XXII of Aquinas in July 1323, Ockham’s defiance of Pope John XXII for asserting in November 1323, heretically in Ockham’s view, that Christ and the apostles had held property and property rights, his association with Michael of Cesena and his followers at Avignon, and then at Pisa and Munich, are some of the well-known circumstances which brought Ockham, from 1327 onwards, to write polemics which have acquired the collective title of opera politica. The facility for searching by electronic means the new edition being made of the largest of these works, the Dialogus, has revealed a passage that I had not noticed in the edition made in 1614 by Melchior Goldast, nor have I seen any reference to it in modern scholarship. The passage, which is found in Part 1, Book 1, chapter 9, and which is reproduced below in Appendix 1, reads in English as follows:

For Thomas Aquinas, writing in a society where there was widespread persecution of heretics, heresy was a species of unbelief (infidelitas) worthy of death. In Aquinas unbelief is the genus of vices opposed to the fundamental theological virtue of faith (fides). Today, in the liberal West, heresy itself is a more or less serious candidate for theological virtue.2 What are we to make of this?

[The] persecuted Church though it hath bene of longe season trodden under foote by enemies, neglected in the world, nor regarded in histories, & almost scarce visible or knowne to worldly eyes, yet hathe it bene the true Church onely to God … continually stirring up from time to time faithfull Ministers, by whome alwayes hath bene kept some sparkes of his true doctrine and religion.

Historians should not need Wyclif to alert them to the dangers of words. Even if our professional futures are unlikely to be threatened, as his was, by the challenging of accepted terms, the words we use can lead us into false positions, and we sometimes need, like Wyclif, to probe the historical dimension of our terminology. What exactly do we mean when we call Wycliffites or Lollards a ‘sect’? How does our word relate to contemporary usage? Do we import alien interpretations by failure to recognize semantic change? If ‘sect’ is a word that leads us into something of an impasse, this paper does not attempt the impossible of pointing to a way out; my aim is merely to indicate some of the hazards of the linguistic terrain and to suggest that looking at the term may itself tell us something useful about Wycliffites and contemporary attitudes towards them.

One of the most immediately striking features of all of Wyclif’s major writings, whether philosophical, theological, or polemical, is the frequency with which cross-references are found both between different chapters or parts of the same work and between works other than the current one. The frequency of cross-referencing is variable. In the philosophical works and the intermediate tracts traditionally placed before the twelve-part Summa theologie, links are not enormously numerous. The first text to show a plethora of them is De civili dominio: here on average one instance occurs roughly every other page, more frequently in parts I and III, in other words some 600 in all. This habit continues with slight abatement in De veritate sacre scripture, and into De ecclesia. Thereafter the remaining parts of the Summa show a diminishing number, still further reduced in the De eucharistia. Cross-referencing is relatively common in the three long sets of sermons composed after Wyclif’s retirement to Lutterworth, and in the Sermones quadraginta written dum stetit in scholis. The device is obviously in origin an academic one, and it is worth observing that some of the major works which were written after Wyclif left Oxford have few if any: in the Trialogus the virtually complete absence of internal Unkings could be explained as the result of a perception that the orderly organization of the whole obviated the necessity for such an aid, but this explanation does not seem relevant to the final Opus evangelkum. Cross-referencing has previously been observed by students of Wyclif, and has traditionally been used in the attempt to order his vast output chronologically, and to put dates to individual works. But this is to jump to conclusions – to assume that the references are authorial and that the works in which they occur were composed as a whole at one time. The discussion here will suggest that there are questions to be answered in regard to the former assumption, and substantial objections to the latter. More modestly, I hope here to use the cross-references to throw light on the ways in which Wyclif’s works were written, put together, and ‘published’.

Almost from their foundation, the mendicant orders proved problematic. Their insistence on poverty, their preaching skills, and their responsiveness to contemporary spirituality challenged the Church at many levels, providing standards against which the secular clergy might be judged and found wanting. Their dependence on papal privileges which limited episcopal oversight, and their claims to a special role as confessors and preachers, threatened the Church’s current order, especially in parishes. By undermining the parish priest’s authority — jurisdictionally by offering confession and absolution, financially by encouraging burial in their houses — the friars in fact undercut some of the aims of the early thirteenth-century reformers, most notably by disrupting the demands of Omnis utriusque sexus, the decree requiring annual confession to the ‘proprius sacerdos’, issued at the Fourth Lateran Council. The most important resolution of these ‘grass root’ problems was provided in Boniface VIII’s Super cathedram of 1300, which by 1326 applied to all four of the main mendicant orders, and formally became part of canon law when enshrined in the Clementines. Unfortunately, Super cathedram seemed incompatible with Omnis utriusque sexus, and debate on the resulting discrepancy persisted throughout the Middle Ages, despite attempts at resolution such as Vas electionis of 1321.

Towards the end of his long career Abbot John Whethamstede, for many years the most celebrated Benedictine monk in England, took the opportunity of a letter he was writing to the prior of Tynemouth to engage in rhetorical but equally eulogistic praise of the ‘extraordinary melodies in praise of the Muses’ to be found not only at ‘the Cabalinian font which gushes forth in the midst of Oxford’ but also from ‘the Cirrean stream which runs near the suburbs of Cambridge’. Few historians of England’s two medieval universities have found it altogether easy to share the undiscriminating enthusiasm of the venerable abbot of St Albans for both Oxford and Cambridge. Gordon Leff — not of course at all alone in this — has done much to elucidate the intellectual and institutional life of the university of Oxford only to find the medieval history of his own university of Cambridge so much less rewarding that it rarely figures in his published work at all. Quite why, for at least the first two centuries of their existence, the Cambridge schools should have always remained less numerically significant and academically influential than their Oxford counterparts is still perhaps a more difficult question to answer than is usually assumed. Even more difficult to explain are the changing patterns of recruitment, patronage, endowment and intellectual activity which during the course of the mid and later fifteenth century at long last eradicated Cambridge’s inferior academic status and established an approximate degree of parity and prestige between the two universities. Without much doubt it was only then, during the century or so before the Reformation, that the historian encounters what Mr Malcolm Underwood has recently diagnosed as perhaps the most remarkable and influential of all ‘Cambridge phenomena’. Indeed if one had to choose a particular point in time when that ‘phenomenon’ must at last have become obvious to all contemporaries, even at Oxford, one might do worse than choose the years between 1505 and 1508, when Lady Margaret Beaufort’s transformation of God’s House into Christ’s College ‘took place against the background of an unprecedented number of royal visits’.* It was on one of those occasions, almost certainly on 22 April 1506, that Henry VII rode towards Cambridge, where ‘within a quarter of a mylle, there stode, first of all the four Ordres of Freres, and after odir Religious, and the King on Horsbacke kyssed the Crosse of everyche of the Religious, and then there stode all along, all the Graduatts, aftir their Degrees, in all their Habbitts, and at the end of them was the Unyversyte Cross’.

In his discussion of the composition of monasteries in the diocese of Lincoln in the early sixteenth century Dom David Knowles wrote ‘that recruits came, so to say, in response to advertisement’, and then went on to add ‘it would seem clear that in the majority of the houses almost all the recruits were local.’ With its profusion of abbeys, priories, nunneries, and friaries Yorkshire provides a great deal of evidence for testing his hypothesis. Fairly confident conclusions can be reached about the geographical recruitment of the Cistercians as they continued to adopt toponymies, while the very considerable number of placenames used as surnames by members of other orders may at the very least intimate their origins in the relatively recent past. The social antecedents of the religious pose a more difficult problem but more random sources, particularly wills, give an indication of the levels of society from which they came. To counteract an impression of excessive localism which undue concentration upon this material might produce, details of their university attendance, degrees, and book ownership have also been included. These northerners belonged to a nation as well as to a region, and the intellectual horizons of a sizeable number of Yorkshire monks, canons, and friars, if not perhaps of many nuns, extended well beyond the limits of their county in the last fifty years before the dissolution.

Some time in 1608, there arrived at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge a distinguished foreign visitor who, through the good offices of the Chancellor of the University, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, and of Merlin Higden, a Fellow of Corpus, had been given permission to examine a manuscript in the college library. The visiting scholar had secured access to the library through a network of contacts that included his friend, a naturalized Frenchman and diplomat working for Cecil, Sir Stephen Lesieur, and a Chiswick clergyman, William Walter. What makes this apparently unremarkable (and hitherto unremarked) incident of more than trivial interest is that the industrious researcher was Jacques Bongars, veteran roving French ambassador in Germany and staunch Calvinist, and that his text was William of Tyre’s Historia Ierosolymitana.

Somewhere about 1970 Gordon Leff changed his mind about William of Ockham. Earlier, in the article The fourteenth century and the decline of scholasticism’ and the survey Medieval Thought, Ockham had appeared in the conventional role of demolisher of the scholastic synthesis of reason and revelation; apologist of pure will in God and man; lock-picker of the Pandora’s box of moral and theological bugs in which the teaching of his successors consisted. Sceptic and/or fideist, he might be credited with clearing the way for natural science, and indeed for Renaissance and Reformation; but in himself he was an apostle of negation, carrying a whiff of the diabolic. Leff made public his change of heart in the massive exposition of Ockham of 1975 and the essay, The Dissolution of the Medieval Outlook, which came out the following year. Ockham was still the author of a ‘metamorphosis of scholastic discourse’ because he had excluded all but empirical knowledge of individual things and had refused to accept that rational proof could be found for more than marginal items of revealed truth. But he had, it seems, believed that ‘nature’ and ‘right reason’ were terms which might be properly used of the physical and moral worlds; random incursions of God’s potentia absoluta (what God might do) into the system of salvation constructed by his potentia ordinata (what God had actually done) were no longer to be anticipated; and Ockham was not responsible for the aberrations of some followers.