rebuffed by a clergy intent on maintaining both its religious monopoly and its secular
interests, drive the laity to reject sacraments altogether. The Waldensians illustrate both
the dangers of lay preaching and the use of vernacular Bibles: doctrinally orthodox, their
conflicts with secular clergy eventually led the church to view them as “heretics,” while
they came to view the church as the “Whore of Babylon.” The béguines and Beghards
illustrate how even a lay, quietistic movement, willing to submit to clerical supervision,
could eventually become entangled in ecclesiastical rivalries (friars vs. regular clergy)
and the internal logic of its own mysticism. Both groups, like the Franciscans, eventually
split into orthodox and heretical sects.
The Capuciati exemplify the intimate mix of politics and religion, of lay religiosity
and social revolution. In 1182, responding to an infestation of brigands in the wake of the
Plantagenêt-Capetian wars, a carpenter from Le Puy named Durand Dujardin had a vision
of the Virgin telling him to form a brotherhood of peace. This confraternity of humble
men who wore white hoods (capuciati), rapidly grew in number and spread throughout
the central and southern provinces of France. Monastic chroniclers praised the movement
and admired the piety of these common laymen; and both lay and ecclesiastic nobles
supported them. Within a year, the sworn Peace militias of the Capuciati had defeated
several armies of brigands, slaughtering thousands. But flushed with success, the
Capuciati extended their definition of plunder to include prelates and nobles who
exploited their serfs: they served notice that no lord should demand any exaction beyond
his legal due and eventually invoked Adam and Eve as proof that all men should be free
and equal. The church rapidly turned against them; chroniclers denounced their raging
madness and heresy; and the lay nobles allied with the remaining brigands to wipe them
out. They did not survive long enough to be condemned officially by the church as
heretics, although the papal bull Ad abolendam (1184) seems to allude to them.
Along with these popular heresies, the rebirth of intellectual life, particularly at the
University of Paris, produced its own strain of learned heresies. The earliest such case
may be the teachings of Berengar of Tours, a product of the school at Chartres who used
grammar and dialectic to question the nature of the eucharist in the mid-11th century.
Peter Abélard’s aggressive dialectical approach to Bible and Creed provoked the wrath of
Bernard of Clairvaux, who had Abélard’s teachings condemned and burned at the
Council of Sens (1140). With the absorption of Aristotle in the 13th century, conflicts
between reason and revelation, or philosophy and theology, intensified. Siger de Brabant
argued for the doctrine of “double truth” (something can be true in theology but false in
philosophy) and articulated a dangerous cosmology: the eternity of the world and the
unity of intellect of all humanity denied key church teachings on the Last Judgment and
the eternity of the individual soul, which will be rewarded or punished according to its
deeds.
The 13th century witnessed the great battle between heresy and orthodoxy on all
levels. The Inquisition emerged in the aftermath of the Albigensian Crusade, promulgated
by the pope and manned by the new preaching orders, the Dominicans and Franciscans
(1229–33). Rapidly spreading and developing their techniques (e.g., torture in 1252),
inquisitors sought out and persecuted “heresy” in the most remote places, as at
Montaillou. Even a (future) pillar of orthodoxy like Thomas Aquinas had his work
condemned and burned in 1277. The aggressive approach of the Inquisition seems to
have eliminated the more extreme forms of religious dissent, or at least driven them into
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