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New Sects and Secret Meetings: Association and Authority in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

R.I. Moore
R.I. Moore*
Affiliation:
The University of Sheffield
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Extract

It is always dangerous to proclaim novelty in religious matters, and seldom more so than in relation to the changes of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In particular the assertions of contemporary observers, bishops, chroniclers and others, that new doctrines were being disseminated or new forms of behaviour detected among the people (a word which, like them, I use in a strict sense to mean the unlettered and the unprivileged, and not simply as a synonym for laity) were usually false, and almost always profoundly misleading. But the assertions themselves are new. They are not without precedent, of course: no epoch of the Christian era has been so bereft of the blessings of civilisation as to be entirely unable to produce episcopal denunciations of novelty. But granted the dangers inherent in all such pronouncements it does seem to me that we encounter in these centuries, for the first time since late antiquity, a rising and, as it turned out, continuous chorus of anxiety that the people were acting collectively for religious purposes if not necessarily outside the church, at any rate without its initiation or approval. In that sense it is appropriate to maintain that the modern history of voluntary religious associations, at least as a source of alarm and despondency to those in positions of authority, begins here. Obviously, therefore, it must be a central preoccupation of this paper, though I hope not the only one, to consider to what extent the source of the anxiety lay in the eye of the clerical beholder rather than in the external popular reality, as well as to wonder in either case what needs gave rise to it, and what purpose it served.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 23: Voluntary Religion , 1986 , pp. 47 - 68
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1986

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References

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11 Moore, Origins pp. 182-5.

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16 History 69 (1984) pp. 455-6.

17 Vita Norberti ed. R. Wilmans, MGH SS XII p. 690.

18 The following paragraphs are largely derived from ‘The Cult of the Heresiarch’, read to the fourth conference of the Commission internationale pour l’histoire ecclésiastique comparée (Oxford 1974).

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24 See now G. Duby, The Knight, the Lady and the Priest (London 1984) esp pp. 107-20; R.I. Moore ‘Duby’s Eleventh Century’, History 69 (1984) pp. 46-7.

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31 PL 182, col. 677.

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41 Eckbert of Schónau, Sermones XIII contra Catharos, PL 195 cols 13-14, 18-21.

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44 ‘Riforma ed eresia’ (above, n. 5) pp. 453-6.

45 Here, following Stock op. cit. p. 123 n., I now accept the view of J.B. Russell, Dissent and Reform in the Early Middle Ages (Los Angeles 1965) p. 22; cf. E. Peters, Torture (Oxford 1985) pp. 38, 47-8.

46 Moore, Origins of European Dissent pp. 67-9, and ‘Guibert of Nogent and his World’ in H. Mayr-Harting and R.I. Moore eds Studies in Medieval History Presented to R.H.C. Davis (London 1985) pp. 108-10; N. Cohn, Europe’s Inner Demons (London 1975) esp pp. 225-55; R. Kieckhefer, European Witch Trials: Their Foundations in Popular and Learned Culture (London 1976) esp pp. 73-92; for a lucid summary of modern views on the European witchcraze see C. Larner, Enemies of God (London 1981) pp. 15-28. All of these, however, need to take account of the specifically political and courtly context of the group of trials around 1300 revealed by E. Peters, The Magician, the Witch and the Law (Philadelphia 1978) pp. 112-35.

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