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Heresy in the Later Middle Ages : The Relation of Heterodoxy to Dissent C.1250-C.1450

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I first came across this work in 1972 while researching the apocalyptic vision of the Spiritual Franciscans. Now, thirty some years later, I have had the leisure to digest this magnificent and epic historical analysis of late medieval heresy, which has stood the test of time as a detailed and thoughtful unfolding of dissent against orthodox Catholic thought and practice. Leff takes the reader from the divisions within the Franciscan Order through the various spiritualist movements and on to the eras of Wycliffe and Hus. This work stops at the gates of Luther's revolt, but to his credit Leff restrains himself from the temptation to depict the Reformation as an inevitable organic outcropping of two centuries of Church dissent. His heresies are related, but only to a point. Wycliffe is not Hus, Peter Olivi is not Waldo, the Beguins are not Taborites.

It would appear that the unifying factor in the author's mind is the use and misuse of the vow and/or practice of poverty. Prior to the arrival of Francis and Dominic to the ecclesiastical scene, heresy, while not exactly a private matter, was usually debated and condemned away from the glare of public scrutiny. Certainly one of the more notorious controversies of the early Middle Ages, Berengarius of Tours' treatises on the Eucharist, was contested rather exclusively at the university and episcopal levels. In the demographics of the day, who among the countless Catholic peasants truly grasped the subtleties of a suspect Berengarius, or a mainstream Peter Lombard, for that matter?

The appearance of the mendicant orders, with emphasis upon consecrated poverty, introduced what in the language of late twentieth century social sciences would be termed "measurable outcomes." It was hard, and still is, to measure a man's conscience or his innermost beliefs. Poverty, with its attendant hardship of life and absence of worldly goods, allowed the medieval world-bishop and peasant alike-to assess the holiness and commitment of a professed believer. It did not take a university professor to discern a disparity between the power, arrogance, and material wealth of many church leaders, and the life of deprivation practiced by certain of the mendicant monks and their followers.

Leff begins his work with a study of Franciscan Peter John Olivi, an extremist on the primacy of poverty, to be sure, but not to the degree of his contemporary and future followers. Olivi's sin, it seems, was his implication that poverty and ecclesiastical legitimacy were connected, so that the authority of a corrupt [worldly] pope could be superceded. Moreover, Olivi connected the preeminence of poverty and the ideals of Francis of Assisi with the apocalypticism of Joachim of Flora, adding a certain content of excitement and inevitability to a reform of institutional Catholicism along the lines of material divestiture.

To varying degrees, the devotion to poverty and the inevitable reforms it bred are intertwined with the multifarious heretical movements that would dot the ecclesiastical landscape till the sixteenth century. Most of the movements held in common a desire for simplicity and piety; the more extreme denied the need for a church altogether, and the very fringe movements were outright Manichean in their condemnation of the non-spiritual. In one sense the variety in this work is the effort of various heretical reformers to arrive at a form of ecclesiatical life most suitable for the restructuring of church life. The Englishman John Wyclif popularized the role of national identity and the "secular arm" in the reform of the church, a thrust continued a century later in Eastern Europe and with different emphases by Jan Hus. Leff attends to the philosophical influences of William of Ockham and Marsilius of Padua upon the political thinking about the place of the Church in civil society, and the social unrest of reformers turned millitants, such as the Lollards and the Hussites. .

A particular form of heretical life that captures Leff's attention are the mystics: Beguins, Fraticelli, Flagellants, and the Free Spirit movement, to name some. Leff notes that the mystics caused Church officials considerable worry, perhaps because implied in their practices and misshapen beliefs were the seeds of a more dangerous concept: freedom of conscience. The mystics represent the most tragic and in some ways the most shameful aspects of this work. The Inquisition was instituted to hunt them down, but Leff detects a papal ambivalent about mystics, particularly the Beguins. Thus, the most intense of persecutions by one pope would frequently be succeeded by a period of clemency and benignancy by a successor.

This work is not an easy read, and it is heavily documented with Latin texts, particularly the works of Olivi, Ockham, and minutes of Inquisition proceedings. It is worth noting that given the age of this work, the advanced student may wish to be aware of the continuing editing of original texts, such as the ongoing translation project of William of Ockham at the Franciscan Institute of St. Bonaventure University. And not surprisingly, other scholars have continued developed many aspects of this study, such as David Burr's recent work "The Spiritual Franciscans" [2001]. Age notwithstanding, Leff's comprehensive treatment of late medieval heresies remains a standard work for any serious student of the era looking for an overview of Church controversy and its impact upon modern day western Christianity.