Content area
Full text
Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives; Studies in Honor of Robert E. Lerner. Edited by Michael D. Bailey and Sean L. Field. Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages 5. Woodbridge: York Medieval, 2018. xiv + 267 pp. $99.00 cloth.
Michael D. Bailey and Sean L. Field have put together an excellent collection of essays in their volume Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives, written in honor of the pioneering work of Robert E. Lerner by many of his own doctoral students. Typically, heresy studies have focused predominantly on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, and in particular on the Waldensians and Cathars, but as the prominence of these movements waned by the beginning of the fourteenth century, so too did scholarly interest and coverage. Moreover, when studies cover the fourteenth century, attention is usually paid to the Lollards and Hussites, but often by both distancing them from earlier medieval heresies and casting these later movements as precursors to the Reformation. Refreshingly, this volume evaluates fourteenth- and fifteenth-century heresy on its own merits and, in doing so, provides a necessary and useful study of this period. These essays have wide geographical and chronological breadth, from Paris to Naples and even Ethiopia, while ranging from 1308 right up to the outbreak of the Reformation in 1517—including an essay on some interesting twentieth-century German historiography.
Proceeding in a mostly chronological fashion, the chapters collectively explore a variety of heterodox movements, individuals, and even the...