In medieval Europe, ecclesiastical and secular concerns interpenetrated one another. In fact, little in medieval history points to the existence of a political sphere separate from the religious. Medieval rule reverberated with notions of a divine order; clerics often acted as representatives of worldly powers; church and state structures were, at times, co-extensive and, more often, co-dependent. From this vantage point, it becomes evident why rulers took on the task of persecuting heretics. As Christian kings, rulers were called upon to protect the church and creed, and no phenomenon threatened ecclesiastical supremacy in matters of the faith more than heterodoxy. Among the many great merits of the study under review here is its insistence that the interpenetration of the secular and the religious has a history. By surveying secular legislation, Sascha Ragg investigates the history of how concerns about heresy pervaded the sphere of the law and politics until the end of the thirteenth century. Ketzer und Recht (Heretics and the Law) thus provides a deft overview over an understudied aspect of medieval law: secular legislation on heretics in Latin Christendom. The book is a published dissertation, which Ragg wrote at the University of Constance, Germany, under the guidance of Alexander Patschovsky, one of the leading experts on heterodoxy during the Middle Ages. Its publication in the venerable Monumenta Germaniae Historica series rightly signals this study's utter solidity as a work of scholarship.
The story of secular heresy legislation begins in late antiquity, during the fourth century CE, when Christianity became the Roman Empire's official religion. Starting as early as 326, imperial laws (later collected and published as the Codex Theodosianus) sought to secure Christian orthodoxy, at a time when a plethora of beliefs flourished and dogmata were being worked out in conflicts over issues such as the nature of Christ or the role of free will in bringing about individual salvation. The vast body of Roman laws devoted to so-called heretics contains a variety of measures that, as Ragg demonstrates, continued to inform anti-heresy legislation into the high medieval period and beyond. In Roman law, heretics were threatened with losing their freedom of assembly and places of worship; they were subject to fines, confiscation, loss of property and suffered severe restrictions on their citizen status; in addition, some provisions specified banishment and, more rarely, execution; finally, their supporters also faced severe punishments. The Codex Iustinianus synthesized these ordinances, at the same time tightening the relevant provisions.
During the early medieval period, however, this legal corpus fell into oblivion. With the exception of black magic, Germanic law, codified since the late fifth century, showed little interest in heresy. Even the Carolingian royal ordinances known by the name of capitularies mention specific heresies and condemn specific heretics only occasionally. If heretical practices entered into the purview of these ordinances, so Ragg states, they were mostly on the theme of simony. In the eleventh century, this picture changed dramatically when the reform church embarked on a sustained fight against its actual or imagined opponents, and heresies resurfaced as a phenomenon. Excommunication as the main tool of discipline--a punishment that allowed the clergy to cleanse the body of the church from defilement--gradually gave way to a legal system in which the so-called two arms, the secular and the ecclesiastical, cooperated. In effect, the forces of the state were called upon to execute the sentences issued by church authorities. It was Gratian, the conceptor of the Decretum (c. 1140), who advanced this sea change in legal thinking and practice. With the emergence of canon law, legal experts of various persuasions re-formulated and re-circulated ancient statutes. In the process, anti-heresy laws were systematized and intensified. In 1231, Pope Gregory IX set up the inquisition--a new, though impermanent, institution whose task was to extirpate unorthodox beliefs and practices.
A last section of Ragg's study tackles whether and how campaigns against heretics manifested themselves in secular politics of the high Middle Ages. During the twelfth century and after, rulers actively persecuted heresies and heretics. England was an exception insofar as English kings do not seem to have issued anti-heresy measures at all. By contrast, their peers on the continent fashioned themselves as defenders of the faith, though to different degrees. While royal ordinances on the matter contained mostly promises, many rulers occasionally took an active role in the fight against religious dissenters, not least in order to further their own political agenda. Via anti-heresy measures, the German King Otto IV, for instance, sought to strengthen the position of his representatives in Italy against competition in the urban communities as well as from the papacy. Emperor Frederick II ceded the initiative to persecute heretics the pope, at least for the German lands, while pursuing a more active role on the Italian peninsula. The malleability of this legal instrument is illustrated by the case of Arnold of Brescia, whose religious reform ideas led to his repeated excommunication; yet only when Emperor Frederick I intervened on the papacy's behalf was Arnold tried and executed (1154). The fact that heresy was increasingly linked with the crime of lèse-majesté extended the reach of secular rulers over religious matters further. Across the European continent, initiatives in persecuting the crimes of heresy shifted to the ruling elites. Their subjects--the lords, communes, and bishops--from time to time put up resistance against these intrusions. Famously, such was the case with Konrad of Marburg, Pope Gregory's IX envoy against heresies in the German Empire, who was murdered in 1233.
The achievement of Ragg's study lies, above all, in providing the reader with a well-sustained account whose detailed narrative offers a wealth of insights on the history of secular heresy legislation. The author meticulously marshals the various legal ordinances, whose texts are conveniently accessible in the main text or the footnotes. Indices make the findings readily available. Understandably, the study's focus lies with the legislation itself, not its enforcement. Wisely, the author has refrained from writing the elusive history of heresies through the lens of legislation. There are however, marked limitations to the analytical path Ragg has chosen. The author's handling of the term heretic itself is strangely static and little historicized (see page 2 for the author's note on this question). The striking vagaries of heresy's manifold meanings in specific contexts remain outside the purview of Ragg's account. From the outset, the author assigns the relevant terms of analysis--heresy, politics, the law--the status of categories above the fray of history. Ragg finds it unremarkable, for instance, that ketzerie, German for heresy, signified as both religious and sexual heresy (presumably male-male sodomy) in the 1276 law code for the city of Augsburg (page 187, fn. 664). Bernd-Ulrich Hergemöller's seminal study on heresy imagery could have provided guidance on the historical semantics of heresy in the thirteenth century (Krötenkuss und schwarzer Kater: Ketzerei, Götzendienst und Unzucht in der inquisitorischen Phantasie des 13. Jahrhunderts, Warendorf: Fahlbusch, 1996). Jacques Chiffoleau's article "Dire l'indicible" perceptively unlocks the various dynamics inherent in persecuting the crimen laesae maiestatis ("Dire l'indicible: Remarques sur la catégorie du nefandum du 12e au 15e siècle," Annales esc. 45 [1990]: 289-324). The limitations on the methodological plane in this study point to desiderata in the historiography on heresy in the Middle Ages, and thereby also to directions for future research.