Heresy in Late Medieval Germany: The Inquisitor Petrus Zwicker and the Waldensians. By Reima Välimäki,. Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages 6. Woodbridge: York Medieval, 2019. xv + 335 pp. $130.00 hardcover.

Heresy in Late Medieval Germany: The Inquisitor Petrus Zwicker and the Waldensians. By Reima Välimäki. Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages 6. Woodbridge: York Medieval, 2019. xv + 335 pp. $130.00 hardcover.

Although titled Heresy in Late Medieval Germany, this book is more directly about inquisitorial practices and mentalities. Specifically, it “explores how inquisition into heresy was once again reshaped in a very particular setting” (3), namely German-speaking central Europe at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth centuries. The focus is on the career and writings of Petrus Zwicker, who conducted a series of inquisitions across several German dioceses from the 1390s until 1404 and who wrote Cum dormirent homines, “the most important anti-Waldensian text of the later Middle Ages” (38).

In terms of its textual source base, this study concentrates on Zwicker's works and related inquisitorial texts. Although many of these are known, Välimäki has gone back intensively to the manuscripts, and the book ends with over thirty pages of appendices chock-full of manuscript information. Among the signal technical achievements here is that Välimäki is able to confidently identify what was previously thought to be an entirely separate work, known as Refutatio errorum, as having been written by Zwicker or at least by those in his immediate circle. Refutatio errorum was often copied alongside Cum dormirent homines, and it was clear that they shared similar concerns, but previous scholarship had associated the text...