Most TMR readers know of the Readings in Medieval Civilizations series of primary source collections and probably use one or more of its volumes in their classrooms. This newest contribution, the twenty-third, will add to the success of the series. Still, some instructors may want to approach the sourcebook with caution, preferring to introduce students to a few of the materials without bringing attention to the entire volume. Students find these sourcebooks expensive--especially when, as is the case here, many of the sources can be found online or in other source collections located in their libraries. As this volume is not as extensive nor as expensive as others in the series, cost is not the greatest concern in this case. My thoughts about the volume’s utility have more to do with the way the volume’s editor, Eugene Smelyansky, constructs intolerance as a historical problem.
As is customary with these volumes, The Intolerant Middle Ages begins with an introduction by the editor; each item is prefaced by a short editorial statement; and three or four questions for students’ reflection and discussion follow each entry. The volume offers seventy-seven readings, mostly excerpts three or four pages in length, arranged in nine chapters.
The first chapter, “Precursors and Origins,” presents texts from the centuries of Christianity’s emergence from within the Roman Empire. Tertullian’s Apology rebuts attempts to conflate Christian rituals with infanticide and cannibalism. In the text recording her martyrdom, Saint Perpetua dreams about her role as a gladiator against evil in the arena where she will be martyred. Constantine takes charge of the Church by issuing a condemnation of Arianism. Augustine supports the use of force against Donatists. An item from the Theodosian Code defends Christianity by attacking its competitors. In sum, the chapter illustrates the shift within early Christianity from persecuted to persecutor.
The remaining chapters identify social fields in which Christians (more specifically, the male secular and religious Christian leaders who produced most of these texts) appear intolerant. Whether we should read this as a typology of intolerance is unclear.
The nine items in chapter two, “Anti-Judaism and Persecution of the Jews,” confirm the impression that more than a few Christians in medieval Europe held Jews in contempt, as a group worthy of revilement and persecution. Churchmen trained Christians to hold such views. Augustine wants Jews to live as a reminder of the faults of their ancestors; examples from the Visigothic Code purport to restrict Jewish life; and some sources accuse Jews of ritual murder (although also included is Gregory X’s defense of Jews against baseless accusations along with his guidance for procedural reform). Eleventh-century crusaders massacre the Jews in Mainz in one reading, and in another from the time of the Black Death, Christians kill Jews in Strasbourg. The selections here seem especially limited, perhaps even myopic, given the range of sources outside of this volume that illustrate highly complex and nuanced Jewish-Christian interactions. Missing, for instance, is any sense that contingencies of time and place mattered in interreligious relations.
Chapter three offers thirteen items on heresy and inquisition. The chapter begins with the predestination controversy stirred up by Gottschalk of Orbais in the middle of the ninth century. It seems oddly out of place given that the remaining items tread the well-known path to rooting out heresy across the period from the mid-twelfth century into the fifteenth century--Bernard of Clairvaux compares heretics to obstinate foxes; canon three of the Fourth Lateran Council demonstrates the vehemence of Innocent III; Bernard Gui, Nicholas Eymerich, and others show how to effect successful investigations. A few items illustrate efforts by suspected heretics to fight back, but these are not enough to permit students to consider inquisition and heresy as culturally and historically dynamic, institutionally and procedurally constrained, and as part of a long and tangled discourse that is about more than intolerance. Perhaps most profitable about the selections is that the inquisitorial metastasis is made apparent, for instance in the interest taken by churchmen to link heresy to orgies and cannibalism.
The six items in chapter four, “External Others: Contacts, Intolerance, and the Making of Medieval Europe,” bring into sharp relief one of the central weaknesses of the collection. These readings are about conquest--which, depending upon recognized readings of such evidence, arguably have more to do with profit and power than with tolerance or a lack of it.
The subjects of chapters five through nine are as follows: 5. Interreligious violence in the Mediterranean; 6. People on the margins of society; 7. Disease and disability; 8. Women; 9. Sexuality. These sections are interesting, with readings potentially useful for a variety of classroom uses, but the questions raised in the earlier chapters remain in these too. Students will easily come to see that some medieval people lacked tolerance for other medieval people, just as they will come to recognize that some medieval Christians used religious distinctions, social class, health and disability status, and gender to marginalize and abuse. But is that enough?
Answers to questions that are basic to the frame of the collection, questions about the forms, modes, and structures of intolerance, will not emerge in any straightforward way from a reading of these texts. Should we want to see state-sponsored physical attacks on fifth-century Donatists as identical to the Golden Legend’s rhetorical attacks upon cross-dressers? Should we equate the executions of the Martyrs of Cordoba with massacres of Jewish innocents? Should we measure Carolingian efforts to keep the peace by the same measure of intolerance as the social anxieties of the fourteenth century that led overzealous inquisitions, wage controls, and restrictions of aid to the poor? Guidance on these matters is missing. And why should a sourcebook raise such an array of questions without adequate support to readers who will want answers? Indeed, my guess is that only overly careful, heavy-handed, pedantic interpretations by their professors will get students past the most obvious reading of the whole, which is that medieval Christians were essentially intolerant.
Not all of the items, strictly speaking, evince intolerance. “False Disability on the Streets of London” (item 54), records the court hearing and punishment of two men who begged while pretending to be mute. The mayor, aldermen, and sheriffs of London ordered the two men to the pillory for three days. While the item suggests that townspeople in late medieval Europe struggled to distinguish those who deserved charity from those who did not, it addresses intolerance only to the extent that London’s leaders did not tolerate a false act; and if it seems acceptable to assume that in most places at most times most people disapprove of false acts, then this item illustrates a low threshold for inclusion in the volume, or too broad a set of criteria for inclusion. It is similarly hard to understand why an excerpt of On the Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus (item 63) should find its place in the volume; Eugene Smelyansky does not address the question in his prefatory comments about a man’s efforts to woo a secret lover. Beyond the aforementioned difficulties, users of the volume will likely find it distressing that the prefatory remarks in many instances fail to offer sufficient assistance in identifying the time and place of the production of the texts or the occurrence of events they report. In the case of item 54, it matters whether students are led to believe that false beggars became a problem for urban leaders before the Black Death or after, in the fourteenth century or the fifteenth. Courtly love, similarly, emerged and then developed over time. Whether Capellanus wrote at the beginning, middle, or end of the period of courtly love norm-setting is worth pointing out. And a direct indication by the editor about the relevance of the text to the issue of intolerance would be dandy.
A core complaint regarding the volume is that it will almost certainly perpetuate the standard prejudice that medieval European Christians were less tolerant than, say, medieval Muslims or modern American Evangelicals. Whether that is Eugene Smelyansky’s purpose is difficult to tell, although evidence in the first sentence of the introduction makes the question worth asking: “To understand the history of persecution and intolerance in medieval Europe, one first needs to understand the history of its dominant religion” (xiii). I might complain aplenty about the Church’s investment in improprieties past and present, but Catholicism was never the sole cause or source of persecution and intolerance.
I find the volume’s cover image especially chilling in the present climate of Black Lives Matter. The image of King Philip II of France presiding over the burning of heretics looks quite a lot like early nineteenth-century images of lynching in the US South, with images of broken bodies hanging from trees and throngs of onlookers pointing and sneering. The correspondence confirms a very clear recognition coming out of recent events like BLM, efforts to recalibrate police use of force, and the #MeToo movement: We need more than newsy reminders about intolerance vaguely defined, since these may do little more than inure us to additional violence. To do more, we need to uncover the underlying structures of violence. By doing so we will understand better the dynamics of specific changes made in the past as well as those proposed for the present and future.