On the morning of Monday, June 22, 2015, an historic event took place in Turin. Pope Francis entered the city’s Waldensian Temple and addressed its congregation. “On the part of the Catholic Church,” he said, “I ask for your forgiveness; I ask it for the non-Christian and even inhuman attitudes and behavior that we have shown you. In the name of Lord Jesus Christ, forgive us!” This was a no doubt choreographed response to the earnest question of Eugenio Bernardini, pastor of Turin’s Waldensian community, who had asked: “What was the sin of the Waldensians? It was a movement of popular evangelization carried out by lay people.”
Pastor Bernardini was, in effect, answering his own question: the medieval Church’s control over preaching and lay involvement in it was always at the center of the movement’s prosecution. The Church’s refusal to grant the early Waldensians preaching rights pushed them further away from the Church and, in that institution’s eyes, into the arms of heresy.
The Waldensians tend to attract some sympathy from historians: apart from their fervor to preach, they have a reputation as moderates on the heterodoxic spectrum. However, at the root of their conflict with the Church lay the central issue of obedience—and the Church’s insistence on that pushed the Waldensians into what was regarded as “error.” That history of error is comprehensively captured in A Companion to the Waldensians in the Middle Ages, a new volume to sit alongside and update earlier important texts such Gabriel Audisio’s The Waldensian Dissent: Persecution and Survival c.1170-c.1570 (1999), the co-editor Euan Cameron’s own Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (2000), and Peter Biller’s collection of his articles in The Waldenses, 1170-1530: Between a Religious Order and a Church (2001). By far the greater volume of literature on the Waldenses has been published in Europe; this new book brings that research, mostly recent and leading edge, to an anglophone audience.
In a very brief introduction, Benedetti and Cameron emphasize to the reader the movement’s longevity, some of its members tracing their origins back not to Peter Valdes and Lyon in the later twelfth century, but to the fourth or even first century. Here might have been a good place to raise the vita apostolica, beloved of medieval reformers and heretics alike, which retains its call even today. While historians still, as a convenient rule, tend to refer to the Waldenses, adherents preferred “brothers and sisters,” the “poor of Christ,” “the people of our law,” and “the handful of people who sustain the earth.” In 1984, Grado Giovanni Merlo identified various “Waldensianisms” and its appellations by external commentators to a variety of separate communities, a theme he returns to in his opening chapter here. Others such as Biller and Audisio have stressed interconnections and continuity. Wisely, the volume does not attempt to impose any uniformity on its contributors: hence we have the appellation varieties of Valdes (the controversy over his name is addressed in the opening chapter) and Durand of Huesca.
Ardent reformers, the Waldenses deemed themselves orthodox Catholics who wished to remain within the ritualistic and ceremonial Church, just, rather incompatibly, doing their own thing when it came to preaching and exegesis. The Waldensian movement consequently was excommunicated in 1184. Sometimes local authorities were indulgent to them; other times, the inquisition extirpated communities in their entirety. (As we shall see below, it is very noticeable how inquisition handbooks—the subject of a number of illuminating recent studies—paid considerable attention to the Waldenses; the Cathars were not necessarily their primary focus.)
The book’s first half, divided into three sections, comprises nine chapters covering the geographical and chronological spread of the Waldensian faith, emanating from Cathar territory in Languedoc and disseminating into Germany, northern Italy and even Aragon (which has previously largely slipped under the radar). By itself, and at over 300 pages, that is substantial enough; but the shorter second half, based on diverse themes and specific topics covered in another nine articles over 200 pages, provides superb additional value, reflecting key scholarship over recent decades. The result is a deeply nourishing and thorough investigation into Waldensian history.
Merlo opens proceedings lucidly with origins in Lyons (the archaic form of Lyon) and the zealous taking up “mendicant-evangelical notions” (14) causing problems for the authorities. The English canon, Walter Map, encountered them, calling them in his De nugis curialium “ignorant illiterate men” who followed a vernacular translation of the Gospels. [1] The Church, of course, felt its monopoly threatened by the lower social orders of Waldenses and their “form of preaching which has to be considered simplistic, but of high moral standing” (18). Following the Lyons synod of 1180, where disparaging comments were made about the movement’s female followers, a new archbishop, Jean Bellesmains, exiled the Waldenses (Merlo prefers “followers” among the plurality of names) from the city in 1184; moving into southern France and northern Italy, they simply spread their beliefs further afield. The “Poor of Lyons” joined the list of heretically proscribed groups in Pope Lucius III’s Ad abolendam decretal of that year. But for Merlo, that list and much other evidence besides points to confusion over who were the real Waldenses and who were divergent from them. Merlo suggests 1205 as a time when the Poor Lombards had decisively broken away from the elderly Valdo. This confusion can hold true for other heresies, with heterodox breakaway factions quickly appearing amidst the broader range of heterodoxy.
Claire Taylor examines the Waldenses in Languedoc in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and their relative freedom of expression there before the Albigensian crusade and its consequent inquisition which, by 1230, began to expunge the region’s active anti-clericalism and religious tolerance. Taylor reminds the reader that the Waldenses were considered “less” heretical than the Cathars and that they actively locked theological horns with them when impinging on “their” territory. Taylor analyzes the contemporary sources on Waldensianism in two sections: pre- and post-1300, starting with Alain of Lille, “the first of the great 12th-century scholars of heresy to discuss the sect in southern France” who applied “criminal tenets” to it (38). She warns against his suggestive comments that Waldensians were leading to a Donatist position. Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cernay, a virulent Catharphobe, acknowledged that the followers of Valdes were in agreement with the Church on many matters. Their dedication to the vita apostolica has prompted Biller to observe that while the Franciscans theorized about poverty, the Waldensians lived it. The 1241-2 inquisition register from the diocese of Cahors understandably receives detailed attention. The register clearly delineates between Cathars and Waldensians. The fourteenth century naturally discusses the inquisitors Jacques Fourniers and Bernard Gui among others. With sections covering historiography, demography, and Waldensian nomenclature and life, Taylor provides an excellent background and overview of Waldensianism in southern France.
In a much-welcomed scholarly undertaking, Damian Smith extends the proselytizing efforts into Aragon of the Catholic Poor grouping, formed by rehabilitated Waldensians such as Durand of Huesca to reconvert their erstwhile fellow heretics. The Catholic Poor, once on the front line against heresy, themselves became suspect, straddling that wafer-thin line between orthodoxy and heterodoxy that wavered and undulated so erratically in the thirteenth century; they “never fully established themselves within orthodoxy” (93). It was the Waldensians rather than the Cathars who preoccupied royal authorities in Iberia, Smith suggesting that the Waldensian threat was in part exaggerated and in part justifying some form of official response. Jacques Chiffoleau casts his gaze onto the Rhone Valley and the political struggles there, examining how a combination of episcopal pastoral control, new secular authorities, and the endeavors of the Franciscans kept a firmer lid on matters than in southwestern France.
The following section follows Waldensianism further afield into the Teutonic sphere. Albert de Lange asks if Austria was a Waldensian heartland, engaging with Karl Ubl’s contention in 2002 that it was not. Heavily, and sensibly, utilizing to great effect Reima Välimäki’s important study from 2019, Heresy in Late Medieval Germany: The Inquisitor Petrus Zwicker and the Waldensians, de Lange’s answers “Yes, it was”, reaffirming Cameron’s judgment from 2000. De Lange then crosses into Bohemia for the thirteenth-sixteenth centuries, where he finds Waldensianism the dominant heresy here and in Moravia, having been disseminated by German-speaking settlers, predominantly from Austria. Unsurprisingly, there is some discussion here of the movement’s influence on the Hussites, a similar debate to that of Lollards and Lutherans in late medieval and early-Tudor England. [2] In a highly absorbing chapter, Biller examines the movement by the Baltic, with Zwicker once again very much to the fore. Once more, as with southern Germany, the Waldensians appear to be more numerous than one might have thought. Georg Modestin moves into western Germany and Strasbourg, revisiting the persecution of the Poor of Lyons culminating in the great Imperial purge of the 1390s, while Kathrin Utz Tremp focuses on the 1399 and 1430 trials in Fribourg, from the only extant records of Waldensians in the city.
Piedmont, Provence and the Dauphiné from the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries conclude Part One. In the “Waldensian Valleys” of Piedmont, Merlo explores the fourteenth-century origins of the mid-sixteenth-century Protestant movement there, dealing with the almost inevitable unevenness of documentary availability that necessitates a focus on Alberto de Castellario’s 1335 inquisitorial records. The region’s Waldensians remained stubbornly resilient until the crusade against them in 1488. Chiffoleau returns with a look at the Alpine Waldenses. The theme of the Waldensians’ fallow period in Provence re-emerges, contrasting with their active phases of 1210-1260 and what might be called their lengthy “Reformation run” of 1460-1540. Chiffoleau ably presents the context of the Avignon papacy and socio-economic changes to explain many of these lacunae. Building on the groundbreaking work of Audisio, he shows how “the Waldenses of Provence laid undetected for more than fifty to sixty years” (253). Here their numbers grew, enlarged by an exodus mainly caused by persecution in Piedmont and the Dauphiné and solidifying in cultural identity. The final chapter of Part One is Cameron’s on the Dauphiné, where Waldensianism has survived up to the present, despite the ardent activities from the later fourteenth century of the Franciscan inquisitor François Borelli, “unusually determined and ruthless...whose memory would long outlast his thirty or so years in office” (279).
These impressive papers in Part One offer a comprehensive geographical spread that is one of the volume’s many great strengths. They are matched by the thematic content of a shorter Part Two. Here the editors dominate, with three of the nine chapters coming from Benedetti and two from Cameron. Benedetti explores three important areas. Examining the Alpine itinerant preachers, focusing on the end of the fifteenth century, she explains the radical impact of preachers starting to marry under Reformation influences (revisited in her essay on women) and the diaspora of Waldensian manuscripts. Travelling in pairs and living the vita apostolica, the learned elder and apprentice, known as barbes only in the Alpine region, preached, healed and proselytized. It would be illuminating to have more information on failings in moral rectitude of the itinerants; Cathar perfecti often fell short. Benedetti follows up with an exploration of the relatively neglected topic of Waldensian women, and how their profile was raised from obscurity to high-profile witchery: arguably the first-ever depiction of a witch flying on her broomstick, from 1451, shows her as a Waldensian. Women featured among the travelling preachers, derogatively called “little women” (mulierculae) by monastic sources, but were obviously more numerous as an audience or congregation; Benedetti provides illuminating examples of the Italian lady Fina of Lanzo engaging in theological discussion on transubstantiation and of those interrogated on the eve of the 1488 crusade. This “forgotten” two-month campaign against the Waldensians of the western Alps is the focus of Benedetti’s final essay, through the prism of the judicial procedures either side of it.
A brace by Biller begins with inquisitorial interrogations of the Waldenses from the 1230s untilcirca 1500, setting out procedure. The episcopal inquisition gradually gave way to the mendicant one. The proliferation of inquisitorial compendia disproportionately featured the Waldenses, despite Cathars being the more dominant heresy; “the reason [for this] can only be conjectured” (361). By the early fourteenth century and Bernard Gui’s Treatise on the Practice of the Inquisition (1323) generalized questions had given way to specific ones directed at Waldensianism. Biller argues that the intellectual needs of inquisitors such as Gui and Zwicker for “neatness and order” (386) imposed simplifying distortions on the movement. His second chapter examines the social care practiced by the Waldensians, chiefly in terms of healing and helping the impoverished; in so doing he securely places them in Michel Mollat’s spectrum of awareness of and responses to material poverty in medieval Languedoc. Biller concludes “there is nothing unconventional or heretical” about Waldensian medical practices (440).
We are back to Waldensians and witches in another absorbing chapter by Franck Mercier and Martine Ostorero. The association—indeed, synonymy—between witches and Waldensians was established, as we have seen, in the fifteenth century; stories arose of nocturnal sabbats and sorcery, the “vauderie.” It was part and parcel of the centuries-old diabolicization of orthodox suppression: “For the heresiology of the 14th century, the Waldensians are not only disciples of the heresiarch Valdo but also already servants of the devil” (399). Misunderstandings of subsequent scholarship has caused long-term confusion and conflation between and of Vaudois-witches and Waldensian heretics.
Luciana Borghi Cedrini and Andrea Giraudo offer a brief survey of ancient Waldensian literature and inspirations, before Cameron brings proceedings to a close with two chapters. The penultimate, on emigré Waldensian communities in Calabria and Apulia, provides a fascinating and welcome English text on this obscure area. Waldensianism flourished in Southern Italy, where toleration was helped by its colonies paying their abundant tithes on time, until Calvinistic influences provoked suppression in 1560-1. The Protestantization of Waldensian history between the mid-sixteenth and later-seventeenth centuries is the subject of the final chapter, bringing an exceptional volume to a fitting conclusion. A Companion to the Waldensians in the Middle Ages, is a superb and wide-ranging collection of important articles offering an indispensable and, in many ways, definitive study of the Waldensians.
On that day in Turin, Pope Francis declared: “But the unity that is the fruit of the Holy Spirit does not mean uniformity. Brothers have in common the same origin, but they are not identical among themselves.” That, of course, is a very modern perspective denied the persecuted Waldensians in the Middle Ages. There are today perhaps 45,000 Waldensian followers, mostly in Italy, Argentina and Uruguay. It is a small number, but a remarkable survival.
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Notes:
1. Walter Map, De nugis curialium, eds. M. R. James, Christopher Brooke and A. B. Mynors (Oxford, 1983), 124.
2. On Hussites, footnote 121 on page 157 cites its quotation from Cameron’s The Waldenses, page 221; it is actually page 231.