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Product Description In this concise and balanced survey of heresy and inquisition in the Middle Ages, Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane explores the increasingly bitter encounters between piety, reform, dissent, and the institutional Church between 1100 and 1500. Although the loaded terms of "heresy" and "orthodoxy" employed by ecclesiastical officials suggest a clear division between right and wrong, that division was in fact vigorously contested by medieval people at all levels of society. Deane investigates key issues that sparked confrontations between Christians, including access to scripture, apostolic models of poverty and preaching, the Eucharist and sacramental power, and clerical corruption and wealth. She traces the means by which Church elites developed an increasingly complex set of inquisitorial procedures and resources to identify, label, and repress "heresy," examines the various regional eruptions of such confrontations across medieval Europe, and considers the judicial processes that brought many to the stake. The book ranges from the "Good Christians" of Languedoc and Lombardy and the pan-European "Poor," to Spiritual Franciscans, lay religious women, anticlerical and vernacular movements in England and Bohemia, mysticism, magical practices, and witchcraft. Throughout, Deane considers how the new inquisitorial bureaucracies not only fueled anxiety over heresy, but actually generated fictional "heresies" through their own texts and techniques. Incorporating recent research and debates in the field, her analysis brings to life a compelling issue that profoundly influenced the medieval world. Review Writing a textbook that offers something new to this field . . . presents a serious challenge, one that is successfully met by Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane in this clear and useful book. . . . It is not attempting to provide an exhaustive reference . . . to medieval heresy, but an account of thinking about heresy, both contemporary and historiographical. It is a guide to the sources and to their modern commentators, which, used in conjunction with . . . other textbooks, will be invaluable for undergraduates and their tutors trying to navigate these increasingly choppy waters. -- L. J. Sackville ― Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane has now written the most intelligent and lucid introduction to these subjects and clearly explained the character of the problems, methods, and means of interpreting them now available. She also includes a very useful and well-connected chapter on superstition and magic, demonology, and witchcraft (chapter 6), setting her articulate and intelligent history fully and intelligibly into the context of our best current understanding of all the relevant facets of the broad, complex, and rapidly changing society of early Europe from the eleventh to the sixteenth centuries. . . . The reader . . . has learned a great deal of very complex history, lucidly and masterfully explained. Deane . . . treats virtually all of Latin Europe with immense competence, great clarity, and manageable compass. This is a valuable book about a controversial subject. -- Edward Peters, Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania ― The Catholic Historical Review In 1144, Bernard of Clairvaux preached a sermon against heresy based on a passage from his beloved Song of Songs; for St. Bernard, heretics were the 'malicious foxes' plundering the Christian vineyard. Hildegard of Bingen warned that heretics were hypocritical servants of the devil. Deane (Univ. of Minnesota, Morris) ably synthesizes the scholarship on those branded heretics by the medieval church, and those who attempted to enforce Christian orthodoxy. Beginning with a brief explanation of the Cathars, Waldensians, and other groups from outside the church hierarchy calling for religious reform, Deane investigates the birth of inquisitorial tribunals in the 13th century, the Spiritual Franciscans, and the role of religiou