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Some heretical attitudes to the renewal of the church
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
Extract
For the most part the authors of the few lurid and fragmentary accounts we have of eleventh and early twelfth-century heretics concentrated almost exclusively on their virulent denunciations of the church, its authority, its sacraments and its priests. Consequently such success as they had has generally been explained in negative terms as the exploitation of anti-clerical sentiment arising from resentment of the church’s corruption on the one hand and the extension of its claims on the other, or as the embrace of alien doctrines imported from outside western christendom. That the second explanation is no longer held to apply before the middle of the twelfth century makes it the more necessary to ask again whether the ability of extremely varied manifestations of religious dissent to attract support in many places did not imply the existence of some positive alternative to orthodoxy, some conception of what a church might be, or what its renewal should involve.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 14: Renaissance and Renewal in Christian History , 1977 , pp. 87 - 93
- Copyright
- Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1977
References
1 The sources of this discussion are collected, in English translation, in Moore, R. I., The Birth of Popular Heresy (London 1975) pp 1–71 Google Scholar; most of them are also in Wakefield, W. L. and Evans, A. P., Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York and London 1969) pp 71–150 Google Scholar.
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14 Brown, P. R. L., ‘Society and the Supernatural: A Medieval Change’, Daedalus (Cambridge, Mass., 1975) pp 133-55Google Scholar; see also Morris, Colin, ‘Judicium Dei: The Social and Political Significance of the Ordeal in the Eleventh Century’, SCH 12 (1975) pp 95–111 Google Scholar. who reflects in conclusion that the ordeal tended to assist the weak against the established order.
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16 Roger of Hoveden, Chronica, ed Stubbs, W., 4 vols, RS 51 (1868-71) 2, p 163 Google Scholar; PL 185 cols 410-16. These points are discussed at greater length in Origins caps 9 and 10.