Goodbye to Waldensianism?

Past and Present

Volumn 192, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 3-33

  Biller, Peter ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF YORK   (United Kingdom)

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EID: 33751022187     PISSN: 00312746     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1093/pastj/gtl004     Document Type: Article

References (126)

1. Euan Cameron, The Reformation of the Heretics: The Waldenses of the Alps, 1480-1580 (Oxford, 1984), 1 (italics added).
2. Grado G. Merlo, Valdesi e valdismi medievali: Itinerari e proposte di ricerca (Turin, 1984)
3. Grado G. Merlo, Valdesi e valdismi medievali II: Identità valdesi nella storia e nella storiografia: Studi e discussioni (Turin, 1991).
4. Fundamental on confessional writing of the history of medieval heresy is Arno Borst, Die Katharer (Monumenta Germaniae Historica [hereafter MGH], Schriften, xii, Stuttgart, 1953), ch. 1, 7§, while Euan Cameron has recounted post-medieval writing of the history of Waldensians in his Reformation of the Heretics, ch. 16, and also in the epilogue of his Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2000).
5. Édouard Montet, Histoire littéraire des Vaudois du Piémont d'après les manuscrits originaux conservés à Cambridge, Dublin, Genève, Grenoble, Munich, Paris, Strasbourg et Zurich (Paris, 1885)
6. Karl Müller, Die Waldenser und ihre einzelnen Gruppen: Bis zum Anfang des 14. Jahrhunderts (Gotha, 1886)
7. Heinrich Böhmer, 'Waldenser', in Realencyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche, xx (Leipzig, 1908).
8. Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter, 2nd edn (Hildesheim, 1961)
9. Herbert Grundmann, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, trans. Steven Rowan, intro. Robert E. Lerner (Notre Dame and London, 1995).
10. Herbert Grundmann, 'Der Typus des Ketzers in mittelalterliche Anschauung', in Kultur- und Universalgeschichte: Walter Goetz zu seinem 60. Geburtstag (Leipzig and Berlin, 1927)
11. Herbert Grundmann, 'Ketzerverhöre des Spätmittelalters als quellenkritisches Problem', Deutsches Archiv, xxi (1965).
12. Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley and London, 1972).
13. Mark Gregory Pegg, The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246 (Princeton and Oxford, 2001).
14. The two best examples of deeper readings of inquisition that emerged from this period are John H. Arnold, Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia, 2001)
15. and Caterina Bruschi, '"Magna diligentia est habenda per inquisitorem": Precautions before Reading Doat 21-26', in Caterina Bruschi and Peter Biller (eds.), Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy (Woodbridge, 2003).
16. Gabriel Audisio, Les Vaudois du Luberon: Une minorité en Provence (1460-1560) (Mérindol, 1984)
17. Pierrette Paravy, De la chrétienté romaine à la réforme en Dauphiné: évêques, fidèles et déviants (vers 1340 - vers 1530), 2 vols. (Rome, 1993).
18. Cameron, Waldenses
19. Euan Cameron, 'Waldenser', in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, xxxv (Berlin, 2003)
20. Euan Cameron, 'Theological Culture as Minority Culture: Intellectuals and the Popular View of the Supernatural (15th-16th Centuries)', in Marina Benedetti and Susanna Peyronel (eds.), Essere minoranza: comportamenti culturali e sociali delle minoranze religiose tra Medioevo ed età moderna (Turin, 2004)
21. Euan Cameron, 'Dissent and Heresy', in Ronnie Po-Chia Hsia (ed.), A Companion to the Reformation World (Oxford, 2004).
22. In a review of Richard Rex, The Lollards (Basingstoke, 2002), in Speculum, lxxix (2004), 1129-30.
23. Paul de Vooght, L'Hérésie de Jean Huss (Louvain, 1960).
24. e siècles): Colloque international, Aix-en-Provence, 8-10 avril 1988 (Turin, 1990)
25. Gabriel Audisio (ed.), Les Vaudois: Colloque international d'Aix-en-Provence (6-7 novembre 1998), published in Revue de l'histoire des religions, ccxvii (2000).
26. Conversations with Gabriel Audisio and Grado Merlo.
27. Cameron's review of Rex, Lollards, 1131. The demolition of the myth that a crucial Waldensian synod had taken place at Chanforan, in Cameron's Reformation of the Heretics, 264-7, is alluded to in the dedication of the book to the person who helped Cameron find Chanforan. It is not out of place to point to a background of preoccupation with the Reformation in Cameron's family: His father, James K. Cameron, was a very distinguished historian of the Scottish Reformation and professor of ecclesiastical history at St Andrews in the 1960s.
28. Grado G. Merlo, Eretici e inquisitori nella società piemontese del Trecento, con l'edizione dei processi tenuti a Giaveno dall'inquisitore Alberto de Castellario (1335) e nelle Valli di Lanzo dall'inquisitore Tommaso di Casasco (1373) (Turin, 1977).
29. Ibid., 10-14.
30. Grado Giovanni Merlo, 'Sopravvivenze di valdesi e valdismi', in Diego Quaglioni (ed.), La crisi del Trecento e il papato avignonese (1274-1378) (Cinisello Balsamo, 1994), 461.
31. This is volume 11 in the series Gino Borghezio et al. (eds.), Storia della Chiesa dalle origini ai nostri giorni (Turin and Cinisello Balsamo, 1937)
32. whose older volumes translate Augustin Fliche et al. (eds.), Histoire de l'Église: Depuis les origines jusqu'à nos jours, 23 vols. (Paris, 1934-64). This particular volume is newly written, filling a gap in the incomplete original French series.
33. Conversation with Grado Merlo.
34. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.), The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd edn (Oxford, 1997), 1714.
35. A photograph of the will is reproduced in Alexander Patschovsky, 'The Literacy of Waldensianism from Valdes to c.1400', in Peter Biller and Anne Hudson (eds.), Heresy and Literacy, 1000-1530 (Cambridge, 1994), 115
36. for Stephen of Anse's employment by Valdes, see ibid., 113-14.
37. v. The Waldensians' Liber electorum fits well with the settlement of the valleys going back far into the thirteenth century: Peter Biller, 'The Waldenses, 1300-1500', Revue de l'histoire des religions, ccxvii (2000), 85-6.
38. 'Accenni a una possibile presenza eterodossa nel Pinerolese risalgono soltanto agli Statuti di Pinerolo che contengono una rubrica, in cui si stabiliva la punizione di chiunque ospitasse "Valdensem vel Valdensam", di datazione imprecise (comunque, non prima del 1220 e non dopo il 1280). Un accenno da non sottovalutare, ma neppure da enfatizzarre, proprio perché esso può significare tutto o niente: vale a dire, potrebbe attestare una presenza o una circolazione di valdesi, così come potrebbe essere soltanto una norma generica per rendere la legislazione locale conforme alla volontà pontificia che imponeva la ricezione nell'ordinamento comunale della normative antiereticale'. Grado G. Merlo, Val Pragelato, 1488. La crociata contro i valdesi: Un episodio di una lunga storia (Torre Pellice, 1988), 9 (italics added).
39. In Valdesi e valdismi medievali (1984), 40-1, Merlo allowed that something could be deduced, while still emphasizing a negative - that no evidence said whence or whither these Waldensians were travelling.
40. The Italian statutes are surveyed in Thomas Scharff, Häretikerverfolgung und Schriftlichkeit: Die Wirkung der Ketzergesetze auf die oberitalienischen Kommunalstatuten im 13. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main, 1996), where the few statutes that mention Waldensians refer to them in a very general way alongside other heretics (46 n. 122, 153 n. 530, 192 n. 694).
41. On Turin, see ibid., 50 n. 144
42. Merlo, Valdesi e valdismi medievali (1984), 39-40.
43. Grado G. Merlo, 'Migrazioni di eretici tra le Alpi occidentali nel XII e agli inizi del XIII secolo', in Migrazioni attraverso le alpi occidentali: Relazioni tra Piemonte, Provenza e Delfinato dal medioevo ai nostri giorni. Atti del convegno internazionale Cuneo, 1-2-3 giugno 1984 (Turin, 1988), 405.
44. L'Inquisition en Quercy: Le registre des pénitences de Pierre Cellan, 1241-1242, ed. Jean Duvernoy (Castelnaud-la-Chapelle, 2001), 66, 84. The appearance of this may have obstructed the publication of the critical edition of the register prepared by Jörg Feuchter of the Humboldt University, Berlin.
45. e siècles) (Toulouse, 2001)
46. Jörg Feuchter, 'Le Pouvoir de l'Inquisition à travers ses peines: le cas de Montauban (1241)', in Gabriel Audisio (ed.), Inquisition et pouvoir (Aix-en-Provence, 2004).
47. L'Inquisition en Quercy, ed. Duvernoy, 130, 132.
48. It occurs in an inquisitor's account: 'Ego Fr Franciscus habui necesse emere equos sine quibus inquisitio non potest fieri convenienter in partibus Pedemontis propter loca multum distancia et periculosa in quibus habitant heretici et Valdenses, qui habitant in vallibus que sunt sub districtu d. Regis Roberti, d. Delphini, d. principis Achaye, d. Marchionis Salutiarum et dominorum de Lucerna': Gerolamo Biscaro, 'Inquisitori ed eretici Lombardi', Miscellanea di storia d'Italia, xix (1922), 545
49. see also n. 23 above.
50. Cameron, Waldenses, 152.
51. See n. 19 above.
52. For recent detailed accounts, see Gabriel Audisio, The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival, c.1170-c.1570, trans. Claire Davison (Cambridge, 1999), ch. 8
53. Cameron, Waldenses, ch. 9.
54. Sympathetic references to the earliest Waldensians in the writings of the famous Paris theologian Peter the Chanter have been discovered by Philippe Buc, and edited and discussed in his 'Vox clamantis in deserto? Pierre le Chantre et la prédication laïque', Revue Mabillon, new ser., lxv (1993).
55. An exemplum about the conversion of a rich Lyon citizen, clearly Valdes, has been discovered in a Cistercian manuscript from Clairvaux, and it is edited and discussed in Olivier Legendre and Michel Rubellin, 'Valdès: Un "exemple" à Clairvaux? Le plus ancien texte sur les débuts du pauvre de Lyon', Revue Mabillon, new ser., lxxii (2000).
56. These need to be set into the new and fundamental presentation of these early orthodox years by Michel Rubellin, 'Guichard de Pontigny et Valdès à Lyon: La rencontre de deux idéaux réformateurs', Revue de l'histoire des religions, ccxvii (2000).
57. On Gui, see Bernard Gui et son monde (Cahiers de Fanjeaux, xvi, Toulouse, 1981)
58. and the introduction to Bernard Gui, Scripta de sancto Dominico, ed. Simon Tugwell (Monumenta Ordinis Fratrum Praedicatorum historica, xxvii, Rome, 1998).
59. On Zwicker, see Peter Biller, The Waldenses, 1170-1530: Between a Religious Order and a Church (Aldershot and Burlington, 2001), chs. 15-16
60. Peter Segl, 'Zwicker, Peter', in Lexikon des Mittelalters, ix (Munich and Zurich, 1999).
61. The 1248/9 question-list is in Texte zur Inquisition, ed. Kurt-Viktor Selge (Texte zur Kirchen- und Theologiegeschichte, iv, Gütersloh, 1967), 71-2
62. and Bernard Gui's question-lists are in the fifth part of his Practica inquisitiones: See Manuel de l'inquisiteur, ed. and trans. G. Mollat, 2 vols. (Les Classiques de l'histoire de France au moyen êge, viii-ix, Paris, 1926-7), i, 26-33, 76-83, 98-105, 156-75.
63. Gui's questions are discussed in Peter Biller, 'Why No Food? Waldensian Followers in Bernard Gui's Practica', in Bruschi and Biller (eds.), Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy
64. Peter Biller, 'Umberto Eco et les interrogations de Bernard Gui', in Audisio (ed.), Inquisition et pouvoir.
65. Le Livre des sentences de l'inquisiteur Bernard Gui, 1308-1323, ed. Annette Pales-Gobilliard, 2 vols. (Sources d'histoire médiévale, xxx, Paris, 2002), ii, 1552.
66. Gui, Manuel de l'inquisiteur, ed. and trans. Mollat, i, 52.
67. The question-list is edited in Quellen zur Ketzergeschichte Brandenburgs und Pommerns, ed. Dietrich Kurze (Veröffentlichungen der Historischen Kommission zu Berlin, xlv, Quellenwerke, vi, Berlin and New York, 1975), 73-5.
68. Ibid., 240, 241, 245.
69. Biller, Waldenses, 279-80, 286-7.
70. Gui, Manuel de l'inquisiteur, ed. and trans. Mollat, i, 48.
71. See Peter Biller, 'Bernard Gui, Sex, and Luciferanism', in Praedicatores Inquisitores I: The Dominicans and the Medieval Inquisition: Acts of the 1st International Seminar on the Dominicans and the Inquisition, Rome 23-25 February 2002 (Rome, 2004).
72. Quellen zur Ketzergeschichte Brandenburgs und Pommerns, ed. Kurze, 88.
73. 'Nauseam habeant de tam vilibus et abhominabilibus rebus': Ibid.
74. 'Waldenses reprobant, imo nauseant ... Luciferianos': Peter Zwicker, Cum dormirent homines, ed. Jakob Gretser, in Lucae Tudensis episcopi, scriptores aliquot succedanei contra sectam Waldensium (Ingolstadt, 1613),
75. cited here from the unaltered reprint in Maxima Bibliotheca Veterum Patrum, ed. Margarinus de La Bigne, 28 vols. (Lyon and Geneva, 1677-1707), xxv, 280.
76. The earliest of the four is edited and translated in Peter Biller, 'Appendix: Edition and Translation of the De vita et actibus', in Bruschi and Biller (eds.), Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy, 195-207
77. see also Peter Biller, 'Fingerprinting an Anonymous Description of the Waldensians', ibid., 163-93, on its probable late thirteenth-century Burgundian origins.
78. The second is in Gui, Manuel de l'inquisiteur, ed. and trans. Mollat, i, 34-65
79. for Gui's use here of the first description, see Biller, 'Fingerprinting an Anonymous Description'.
80. The third, associated with a Germanophone inquisition of around 1400, is edited by Ernst Werner, 'Nachrichten über spätmittelalterliche Ketzer aus tschechoslowakischen Archiven und Bibliotheken', Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universität Leipzig (Gesellschafts- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, suppl. to vol. xii, Leipzig, 1963), 265-71
81. see Biller, Waldenses, 71.
82. The fourth was written in 1530 by one of the last of the Waldensian Brothers, Le confessioni di fede dei Valdesi riformati: Con i documenti del dialogo fra la 'prima' e la 'seconda' Riforma, ed. Valdo Vinay (Collana della Facoltà Valdese di Teologia, xii, Turin, 1975), 36-51.
83. A polemicist writing around 1235 referred to an action thirty years beforehand displeasing Valdes: Salvo Burci, Liber Suprastella, ed. Caterina Bruschi (Fonti per la storia dell'Italia medievale, Antiquitates, xv, Rome, 2002), 287.
84. For the letter, see Quellen zur Geschichte der Waldenser, ed. Alexander Patschovsky and Kurt-Viktor Selge (Texte zur Kirchen- und Theologiegeschichte, xviii, Gütersloh, 1973), 20-43.
85. 'Ad sanctum Petrum in der Awe et ibi scole'. Alexander Patschovsky's working edition of the text is given in Peter Segl, Ketzer in Österreich: Untersuchungen über Häresie und Inquisition im Herzogtum Österreich im 13. und beginnenden 14. Jahrhundert (Quellen und Forschungen aus dem Gebiet der Geschichte, new ser., v, Paderborn, 1984), 172.
86. r. The letter is edited in Peter Biller, 'Aspects of the Waldenses in the Fourteenth Century Including an Edition of their Correspondence' (Univ. of Oxford D.Phil. thesis, 1974), 272-99
87. for a description of the seven manuscripts, see ibid., 216-21.
88. The Klosterneuburg MS, which contains more elements of the correspondence from which this letter survives than any other manuscript, is the only one to have this rubric: See Biller, Waldenses, 223 n. 52.
89. Quellen zur Ketzergeschichte Brandenburgs und Pommerns, ed. Kurze, 154.
90. Dietrich Kurze, 'Zur Ketzergeschichte der Mark Brandenburg und Pommerns vornehmlich im 14. Jahrhundert: Luziferianer, Putzkeller und Waldenser', Jarhbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands, xvi/xvii (1968), 70 n. 81, 79.
91. Ibid., 71-2, 79-80
92. Hermann Haupt, Waldenserthum und Inquisition im südöstlichen Deutschland (Freiburg im Breisgau, 1890), 82-91.
93. Biller, Waldenses, 113-17, 123
94. Georg Modestin, 'Weiträumige Kontakte: Strassburger Waldenser in freiburgischen Quellen (bis 1400)', Freiburger Geschichtsblätter, lxxxii (2005).
95. Quellen zur Geschichte der Waldenser von Freiburg im Üchtland (1399-1439), ed. Kathrin Utz Tremp (MGH, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, xviii, Hannover, 2000), 359.
96. Margaret A. E. Nickson, 'The "Pseudo-Reinerius" Treatise, the Final Stage of a Thirteenth-Century Work on Heresy from the Diocese of Passau', Archives d'histoire littéraire et doctrinale du moyen âge, lxii (1967), 302
97. Alexander Patschovsky, Der Passauer Anonymus: Ein Sammelwerk über Ketzer, Juden, Antichrist aus der Mitte des 13. Jahrhunderts (MGH, Schriften, xxii, Stuttgart, 1968), 67
98. Biller, 'Appendix', in Bruschi and Biller (eds.), Texts and the Repression of Medieval Heresy, 200-3.
99. See at n. 60 below.
100. Peter Allix, Some Remarks upon the Ecclesiastical History of the Ancient Churches of Piedmont (London, 1690), 352, 354.
101. For modern study, see Marina Benedetti, 'Peironeta di Beauregard, l'inquisitore e i Valdesi', in Marina Benedetti, Grado Giovanni Merlo and Andrea Piazza (eds.), Vite di eretici e storie di frati (Milan, 1998). Benedetti is re-editing the trial.
102. This text is edited in Biller, 'Aspects of the Waldenses', 352-5, and analysed in Biller, Waldenses, ch. 7.
103. There is an alternative suggestion in Cameron, Waldenses, 154.
104. Timotheus Wilhelm Röhrich, Mittheilungen aus der Geschichte der evangelischen Kirche des Elsasses, 3 vols. (Strasbourg, 1855), i, 51.
105. These inquisition depositions in Strasbourg are being re-edited by Georg Modestin: See his '"Dass sie unserer Stadt und diesem Land grosse Schmach und Unehre zugefügt haben": Der Strassburger Waldenserprozess von 1400 und seine Vorgeschichte', in Albert de Lange and Kathrin Utz Tremp (eds.), Friedrich Reiser und die 'waldensisch-hussitische Internationale': Akten der Tagung Ötisheim-Schönenberg, 2. bis 4. Oktober 2003 (Waldenserstudien, iii, Heidelberg, Ubstadt-Weiher and Basel, 2006), 189-204.
106. Merlo, Valdesi e valdismi medievali (1984), 61-2.
107. Cameron follows Merlo, writing that the account 'has no parallel elsewhere in Europe': Waldenses, 153.
108. Merlo, Eretici e inquisitori, 220.
109. The links were detailed in Le Registre d'inquisition de Jacques Fournier évêque de Pamiers (1318-1325): (Manuscrit Vat. Lat. no. 4030 de la Bibliothèque Vaticane), ed. Jean Duvernoy, 3 vols. (Bibliothèque méridionale, 2nd ser., xli/1/2/3, Toulouse, 1965), i, 100-1 n. 36.
110. Le Livre des sentences de l'inquisiteur Bernard Gui, ed. Pales-Gobilliard, ii, 1576, 1578.
111. I am preparing a study of the women among Waldensian friends who preserved and transmitted their history.
112. Quellen zur Ketzergeschichte Brandenburgs und Pommerns, ed. Kurze, 171-4
113. v. Virtually every follower was questioned by Zwicker on the Brothers' status and authority, but Kurze only reproduces some of their answers in his selective edition. The statement made here, that four out of 195 depositions show followers with an accurate grasp of this point, rests on reading all the responses in Herzog-August Bibliothek, MS Helmst. 403 and MS Novi 348.
114. Quellen zur Ketzergeschichte Brandenburgs und Pommerns, ed. Kurze, 201-2.
115. 'Libencius ivisset ad cervisiam quam ad confitendum eis' (ibid., 185). We cannot know whether this was true or a lie. Even if it was a lie, it will have had to have been a plausible lie and as such it still makes the point.
116. Ibid., 155.
117. Cf. John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1985), 81, on the unpopularity of Lollards.
118. Audisio, Les Vaudois du Luberon.
119. Nickson, '"Pseudo-Reinerius" Treatise', 306-7.
120. Alexander Patschovsky has shown that there was a very large number of Waldensian heretics in early fourteenth-century Austria and Bohemia: See Quellen zur böhmischen Inquisition im 14. Jahrhundert, ed. Alexander Patschovsky (MGH, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, xi, Munich, 1985), 18-24.
121. On this text, see Biller, Waldenses, 121-2.
122. r.
123. Cameron, Waldenses, 129.
124. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae sive origines, VIII, ed. W. M. Lindsay (Oxford, 1911), De ecclesia et sectis (unpaginated).
125. Patschovsky, Der Passauer Anonymus, 109-11.
126. See Haupt, Waldenserthum und Inquisition, 80, on the inquisitor Henry of Olomouc's trials of many Austrian Waldensians during this period, known only through references in later inquisitorial sentences.