Between Orders and Heresy takes its title from the provocative opening line of Herbert Grundmann’s Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter (1935): “All religious movements of the Middle Ages achieved realization either in religious orders or in heretical sects.” [1] The claim, which has become something of a cliché, still exerts great force in the field of medieval religion, where much scholarship remains segregated between approved, orthodox religious communities and condemned, heretical groups. (Indeed, though their repertoires are more extensive than this, it is interesting to reflect that the two editors of the present volume have focused some of their research on opposite sides of the divide: Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane on heresy and inquisition, and Anne E. Lester on female Cistercian communities. [2]) But as famous as Grundmann’s opening line has become, Deane and Lester point out that it was his “broader convictions” about medieval religion, not his thesis per se, that have “continued to galvanize new research and ways of thinking” (5). This wonderful collection of essays respectfully engages with Grundmann’s ideas while underscoring the need to question aspects of his narrative.
The volume opens helpfully with a Preface by John Van Engen that sketches Grundmann’s contributions to the study of medieval religion and to a broader “religious turn” in medieval studies (xi). Unusual for his day, Grundmann emphasized commonalities between religious movements that had previously been treated as separate, even opposed; he also shed light on the role of women, an insight that has spurred decades of excellent scholarship on female religious and “semi”-religious. And yet Grundmann’s juxtaposition of heresy and order did little justice to the messiness of life on the ground. “[T]he various spaces and possibilities ‘in between’ orders or heresy” (xvii), then, are the focus of the articles in Between Orders and Heresy. Deane and Lester expand on this point in their Introduction, arguing that new archival evidence simultaneously “reaffirms some aspects of [Grundmann’s] narrative and...challenges others” (6), making it high time to “develop a new narrative” and “re-conceptualize the landscape of religious movements in the Middle Ages” (7). The assembled articles sprang from sessions on Grundmann’s legacy organized for the 2015 International Congress on Medieval Studies at Leeds, and the editors have not forced the diverse results into categories by era, location, or theme. Nevertheless, the essays hang together thanks to their shared orientation to Grundmann’s thesis and their broader historical purpose: that is, to “foregroun[d] the dynamic, creative, and highly diverse later medieval socioreligious landscapes flourishing within the interstices of ecclesiastical structures” (8). More specifically, they examine the “religious experience” of marginalized groups (especially of women), and examine the impact of those experiences on “definitions of order and heresy” (8-9). As with any edited volume, some readers may choose to pick out case studies relating to their own interests (and particular chapters lend themselves to this approach). The most thought-provoking results, however, are to be had by taking the collection as a whole and noticing the underlying themes, implicit connections, and even subtle conflicts among them.
An outlier among the essays, but an important one, is Letha Böhringer’s (chapter 2), which serves as an extension of the preface and introduction by exploring Grundmann’s own career. Grundmann was among the many German scholars who were smoothly reintegrated into academia after their Denazification, despite having accommodated and perhaps even supported the National Socialist regime. Does, or should, this affect how medievalists now view his work? Did his views on the Nazis influence his attitude toward religion and his decision in October 1934 to leave the Protestant church? Based on her analysis of Grundmann’s papers in the University of Leipzig archives, Böhringer strikes a nonpolemical note: Grundmann’s choice to leave the church was a matter of personal conviction, not political opportunism (29, 33), but this does not negate the fact that he was part of a generation that “failed to take responsibility” for the rise of Nazism (35). Nevertheless, Böhringer points out that Grundmann’s more positive statements regarding the Nazis postdate the 1933 formulation of Religious Movements (26), suggesting this early work might stand apart from a discussion of his activities under the National Socialists.
The remaining essays are devoted, not to Grundmann himself, but to exploring the legacy of his ideas and complicating many of the themes he emphasized. Thus, for example, several authors engage critically with the terminology he used to discuss medieval religion. Amanda Power (chapter 3) questions the “apostolic model” as a valuable historical category, using Francis of Assisi as her example. Grundmann himself, she argues, took the language of apostolicity at face value and therefore lent credence to the traditional view of Francis as the spiritually “authentic” medieval figure par excellence (46-47). For Power, however, it is important to note the ways in which the Church used the category of apostolicity (that is, genuine religion) to enforce its norms, and the ways in which Francis used this language to “creat[e] holy authority” (46, emphasis added). In other words, the apostolic model was a construct, a tool of ecclesiastical power (63-64). A softer approach to the same terminology is taken by Neslihan Şenocak (chapter 6). While pointing out the difficulty in “assigning a fixed meaning” to a concept like apostolicity (172), Şenocak does not so much question its explanatory power as reject the two elements Grundmann saw as its defining features: poverty and preaching. On the contrary, she argues that what most defined the varied manifestations of the religious movement was associative religiosity (172-173). Şenocak demonstrates that the popularity of confraternities--corporations emphasizing communal worship and an egalitarian social dynamic (183)--undermines Grundmann’s definition of the vita apostolica: these communities practiced neither poverty nor preaching, yet claimed to be practitioners of an authentically apostolic life.
Categories like apostolic are thus proving more amorphous than Grundmann envisioned. Similar definitional problems are taken up in other chapters, most explicitly by Sita Steckel (chapter 4) and Janine Larmon Peterson (chapter 10). If Power and Şenocak both discuss, in different ways, “genuine” medieval religion as embodied in the term vita apostolica, then Steckel’s contribution rounds out that picture by examining disingenuous medieval religion as embodied in the termhypocrite. Exploring polemics by the likes of Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153), Paganus Bolotinus (before 1138), and William of Saint-Amour (d. 1272), Steckel reveals the charge of hypocrisy accumulating new inflections from the twelfth century, when it was deployed against the alleged false superiority of new monastic orders, to the thirteenth and fourteenth, when it was used against the mendicants to connote heresy. Fascinatingly, her study shows that rhetorical attacks on “hypocritical” religious cannot be explained merely as symptoms of a decadent late medieval Church. Rather, it was the liveliness of that Church, with all its attendant “internal pluralization,” that created “a new emphasis on ‘genuine’ Christianity” as laypeople tried to make informed decisions among competing groups (109). Having such a plethora of options on the table led to sharper criticisms and more frequent charges of hypocrisy. Quite different in this regard is the term heresiarch, explored by Janine Larmon Peterson (chapter 10). While her title provocatively asks “why women never became heresiarchs,” she does adduce an example of one who did: Na Prous Boneta (d. 1328). Peterson suggests, however, that this exception proves the rule that female leaders of heretical groups were not given this title by ecclesiastical officials. In her view, the explanation lies not with misogyny, but with the practical application of a technical term: though a heresiarch was, legally speaking, the founder of a sect, the term was applied rarely in official documents, and always connoted someone who was a political or military threat to the papacy (278). One might say, then, that while more and more people became hypocrites in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, far fewer were “allowed” to be heresiarchs.
Peterson’s chapter points to another common thread in the volume, the influence of women across a wide range of (heretical or orthodox) religious movements. Indeed, while the editors seek to elucidate the “religious experience...of women, peasants, townspeople, and marginalized groups” (8-9), it is urban women who dominate the chapters. (Telling in this respect is Jana Grollová’s valiant attempt in her contribution on the beguines of medieval Prague [chapter 12] to say something about the city’s male lay communities: the source material is simply too sparse to produce more than a paragraph [316].) Some of the resulting case studies fit more or less neatly into Grundmann’s framework. For example, Lezlie Knox (chapter 11) uses the example of Margherita Colonna (d. 1284) to explore the surprisingly understudied religious topography of Rome, arguing that elite Roman women actively “shap[ed] their religious experiences outside the institutional confines of the religious orders and ecclesiastical hierarchy” (290). If Knox’s contribution is somewhat less successful in explaining why Margherita’s cult failed, it does provide a significant example of the “organic and flexible arrangements” women made regarding their own religious lives (299). Other chapters probe the limits of Grundmann’s conclusions about those lives--and even of his concept of religious movements. Anne E. Lester’s chapter (chapter 5), for instance, uses the example of Countess Mahaut of Courtenay (d. 1257) to fold the crusades into Grundmann’s broader religious movement. Relegated in Grundmann’s day to the fields of military and legal history, crusading has come to be treated as a religious phenomenon--one fostered within family networks like that of Mahaut, a participant on the Fifth Crusade and a prime example of women’s roles in keeping crusade devotion alive through their patronage, charitable activities, and lordship (129).
In addition to exploring the prominent position of women in a major devotional current, Lester’s chapter emphasizes what she calls “vernacular crusading” (129), the furthering of crusade devotion through such activities as writing and singing crusade poetry. This thread of vernacularity is taken up in two other pieces: by Sean L. Field (chapter 7), which turns to the role of women in French vernacular religious literature at the beginning of the fourteenth century; and by Grollová (chapter 12), which explores how Prague beguines consumed and produced vernacular religious texts and participated in the fifteenth-century Hussite movement. Of these, Field’s engages most explicitly with Grundmann’s claim that vernacular religious texts arose because of “a new stratum...between laity and clergy” that sought spiritual education but was unlatinate--a stratum composed largely of women (189). According to Grundmann’s model, the mendicant orders produced vernacular religious literature for unenclosed women, who in turn began to produce their own (190). Field’s case studies reveal the limitations of this argument, since several French female writers produced vernacular texts to defend the legitimacy of their institutions and did not do so from within mendicant circles (195). Yet, on the other hand, Agnes of Harcourt (d. 1291) serves as one example of a female author who demonstrably modeled her work on a text provided by the friars. Field’s contribution thus in some ways captures the tone of the volume: renovating elements of Grundmann’s design but keeping many of the original bones.
Following Field’s chapter consecutively and thematically, Tanya Stabler Miller (chapter 8) rethinks another aspect of Grundmann’s thesis: his insistence that secular clergy were hostile to unenclosed women (217). Certainly so-called beguines were controversial; yet, once again, Miller demonstrates that reality was messier than Grundmann realized. For Robert of Sorbon (d. 1274), a fierce and frustrated opponent of the friars, the women labelled “beguines” were not problematic but pious; by their positive example to the laity, they had a role to play in the post-Lateran IV pastoral reformation (218). Indeed, in his sermons Robert identified strongly with such women, contending that both beguines and secular clergy endured ridicule for their virtuous lives (223). It is interesting to compare this warm commendation, which suggests the flaws in Grundmann’s approach, to the situation in the fifteenth century, when interest in the legal status of extra-regular women sharpened again during the Observant reform movement. Alison More (chapter 9) explores this shift as it relates to one female “federation” (242), the Grey Sisters. More views these communities as “subject to the Observant program of reform,” which sought to achieve “uniformity and order” by enforcing papally approved rules and sometimes by rewriting internal histories to create unimpeachable (but mythical) pedigrees (246-247). More portrays this process as one imposed from outside, presumably against the women’s own wishes, but points out that regularization did not in fact create a uniform lifestyle across all communities of Grey Sisters (249). Even as these women were pushed, encouraged, or even (one might suggest) chose for themselves to adopt the trappings of an approved order, they maintained an element of liminality.
As these too-brief summaries have shown, Between Orders and Heresy is not comprehensive. The case studies come from the continental mainland and Italian peninsula, with no examples from Spain or the British Isles; and as noted above, while the volume’s stated goal is to investigate religious experience across a wide range of participants, in practice it focuses on enclosed and unenclosed women. But no collection can be fully inclusive, and these gaps merely serve to highlight possibilities for further research. Perhaps more importantly, one could question whether the volume successfully proposes an alternative narrative to Grundmann’s. Certainly it demonstrates the limitations of his thesis and shows the fruitfulness of investigating the area “in between” order and heresy, but because it is an edited collection, it does not lay out a single vision, a framework to take the place of that earlier structure. Yet the absence of a vision as stark as Grundmann’s is, in my view, an argument in the volume’s favor. Appealing (and quotable) though his thesis remains, no such black-and-white statement can do justice to the realities on the ground. The great success of Between Orders and Heresy is in its nuance: the ability of its authors to extract and preserve aspects of Grundmann’s work while questioning or rejecting others, to show the range of lived experience across time and space without attempting to harmonize the results. It is a fitting testament to a scholar whose own work did so much to encourage appreciation for the complexities of medieval religion.
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Notes:
1. Herbert Grundmann, Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter. Untersuchungen über die geschichtlichen Zusammenhänge zwischen der Ketzerei, den Bettelorden und der religiösen Frauenbewegung im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert und über die geschichtlichen Grundlagen der deutschen Mystik (Darmstadt, 1961; orig. 1935), trans. Stevan Rowan, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages (Notre Dame, 1995), 1.
2. For example, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane, A History of Medieval Heresy and Inquisition (Rowman & Littlefield, 2022; orig. ed. 2011) and Anne E. Lester, Creating Cistercian Nuns: The Women's Religious Movement and Its Reform in Thirteenth-Century Champagne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2011).