Popular Heresy

Question 1

Popular vs. intellectual heresy

Answer 1

A) Relationship between church and state

B) Church reform against a backdrop of
conflict between Pope and Emperor,
Pope and kings

C) What is the role of the individual in faith?

Question 2

Reformation

Answer 2

family church ownership, secular control over church (Proprietary church) corruption, married clergy=the norm everywhere

Libertas ecclesiae: Freedom of the church

return church to its “original purity”
–eliminate simony (buying/selling of church
offices)
–eliminate clerical marriage
–free churches and the Church from secular
control
–end investiture=the investing by a secular
lord of a churchman in his clerical office)

On the road to separating of
church and state (though clerics
and laymen on both sides)

Question 3

Heretics

Answer 3

1000-1050: groups of the Arras, Monforte sort

1050-1100: popular heresy relatively absent. Exceptions: Patarenes of Milan (promoted by Pope Gregory VII)

1100-1150: outburst of popular heretical
movements, primarily Donatist and anti-clerical: Éon de l’Étoile; Tanchelm of Antwerp; Henry of Lausanne (aka Henry of Le Mans, Henry the Monk)

Questions to think about:
1) links between heresy and church reform;
2) in a religious age, is dissent that is social in nature most likely to be expressed in religious
terms? To what extent do social and religious dissent overlap?
3) Is heresy doctrinal, or mainly an issue of
authority?

Question 4

Cathars

Answer 4

Cathar dualism:

1)Radical or absolute: evil and good as
separate (potentially equal) principles

2) Mitigated: two principles, but evil
subordinate to good

(Jesus spirit, not body—cf. “Gnostics”)

Diversity in Cathar mythologies

Question 5

Consequences of church and state struggle

Answer 5

—evolution of a rationale for “secular government” that is separate from spiritual realm, though sacral kingship continues
—idea of state as source of justice and law, bureaucratic entity, responsive to will of its citizens
—Church clamor to superiority over secular realm undermined by its visibility nonspiritual actions; calls attention to gap between what reformers say church ought to be and what it is
—individuals questioning both spiritual authority of church and secular authority of king

Question 6

Women in Religion

Answer 6

Frauenfrage the “woman question”

Unofficial female Cistercian houses:

• no provisions made
• attempts to control
• Bernard of Clairvaux on the issue of women and the corruption of morals

Beguines

• Northern Europe particularly, middle class
• chaste, austere lives, but no monastic rule
• no vows, hierarchy, place within hierarchy
• worked in world
• large percentages
• women’s movement (vs. begards)

Question 7

Men vs. women

Answer 7

Bynum- make piety =renunciation of wealth, status, punishing of body

Female piety =control only food, women as body rather than spirit

Women excluded from clergy, cloistered, suspected of lust, women are flesh, literally food

Imagery of visions: sexual imagery (bride of Christ); Jesus as nursing mother (mostly male); imagery of food and food practices (female)

Women’s own writings vs male biographers

Question 8

Women as food

Answer 8

1) fasting (on earthly food, on the suffering of humanity)
2) feasting (on Eucharist and human suffering)
3) feeding (family, others, suffering of Kesus, mankind through their own suffering)

WEAKNESS AS SOURCE OF POWER