Customer Reviews

The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival, c.1170-c.1570 (Cambridge Medieval Textbooks)

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If you're interested in Medieval Heresy, you've probably noticed that a good book on the Waldensian dissent is hard to find. Audisio's book is excellent if you want to fill in the gap. It's very well organised and user-friendly. It offers a comprehensive explanation of the movement's history and doctrine. Don't expect an astonishing critical insight, but as a textbook this is everything you could wish for.

I read the introduction of this book and it was enough to clearly determine that this is A Catholic Account of the Waldensian Dissent.... Perhaps this is a well written book from the historical perspective of the Catholic church, but this, if the introduction is true to the book, by no means is an objective investigation of who these people were. There is much conjecture, assumption and even pretentiousness evident within the introduction. An excellent counterbalance to read would be J.A. Wylie's book, The Waldenses or Foxe's Book of Martyrs. Another book, which is a first hand account of the atrocities committed by the Papacy against the people of the Waldensian valleys in the mid 1600's is The General History of the Evangelical Churches of the Piedmontes Valleys, by Jean Leger.

The author is quick to point out in the introduction that there are very few documents that have survived from these people dismissing them as "peasants, not scholars or men of influence who cultivated the written word," but this is the same style of pretentious depreciation that underlies the real reason for the all but complete loss of Waldensian archives. The Catholic inquisition that swept over Europe burned any text it deemed "heretical," and these people were so reviled by the papacy that their writings were highly prized to stoke the flames of righteous ignorance. The Voudois, Waldenses, Poor of Lyons, whatever you would like to call them were one of the first peoples of Europe to receive the Greek and Hebrew texts of the Bible and to then translate it and disseminate it with fervor across Europe. There were indeed Waldensian scholars, however, not from the halls of university but within the study of the Bible. The inquisition did much to erase this history, but thankfully enough has indeed survived through the relentless efforts of those "dissenters" who survived, such as the likes of Joshua Gianavel, and those who sympathized with them enough to aid them in their quest to survive and spread the gospel in it's truest form in as many languages as they could provide translation.

This book was required by a professor of Religious Studies at the University of Iowa and it was a great read.