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Inquisition in the Fourteenth Century: The Manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich by Derek Hill

2021; The Catholic University of America Press; Volume: 107; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/cat.2021.0042

1534-0708

Richard Kieckhefer,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

Reviewed by: Inquisition in the Fourteenth Century: The Manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich by Derek Hill Richard Kieckhefer Inquisition in the Fourteenth Century: The Manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich. By Derek Hill. [Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages, Volume 7]. (York: York Medieval Press. 2019. Pp. x, 251. $99.) A few years ago, some of the most interesting and important work on medieval inquisition and inquisitors moved either inward or outward. Karen Sullivan's book The Inner Lives of Medieval Inquisitors (2011) turned toward the subjectivity of individuals in an effort to understand what drove their inquisitorial zeal, while Christine Caldwell Ames's Righteous Persecution looked beyond the inquisitors to medieval Christendom generally and found a repressive mentality that was widely shared.2 Now we have Derek Hill's Inquisition in the Fourteenth Century: The Manuals of Bernard Gui and Nicholas Eymerich (2019), which turns neither inward nor outward but is focused resolutely on texts and their contexts and is in its own way among the most important of recent books on the medieval repression of heresy. It might be easy to overlook the significance of this book. The subtitle suggests the sort of comparison and contrast that could seem formulaic, perhaps even superficial. Many readers will know already that Gui and Eymerich played key roles both as inquisitors and as writers of inquisitorial manuals, and that in the early modern period an edited version of Eymerich's Directorium inquisitorum became the most important of all such manuals. It is not those circumstances alone, however, that make Hill's discussion worthy of attention. Over and above his treatment of these men and their writing is Hill's persuasive argument that between Gui and Eymerich, or between the 1320s and 1370s, there were crucial shifts in the concept of heresy and in the understanding of how heretics should be treated. These changes cannot be abstracted entirely from the personalities and circumstances of the two inquisitor-authors, but Hill shows how these two men bring into focus changes that are not merely personal. Inquisitors and inquisitions had responded to heresy as early as the thirteenth century, and by the sixteenth century the machinery of the Spanish and Roman Inquisitions was in place; from Hill we learn how important the fourteenth century was as a transitional period. Gui served as inquisitor in Languedoc, where inquisitors had been at work for nearly a hundred years and had developed ample bureaucratic [End Page 624] resources. He worked in close cooperation not only with the bishops but with the French monarchy, which saw heretics as potential separatists, took considerable interest in their repression, and gave inquisitors financial backing. While Gui recognized that heretics could be devious, he was interested in securing their penitence. He and other inquisitors in Languedoc had been given specific mandate to deal with particular heresies, and in principle they could complete their work and be done, in which case there would be no need for permanent inquisitorial operation. His manual was meant specifically for fellow inquisitors, not for outsiders; having a clearly defined audience, it survives in only six manuscripts. Eymerich's inquisitorial operation was far more autonomous than Gui's. He had no financial support from the Aragonese monarchy, claimed a relatively high degree of independence even from his Dominican order, and sought support less from local bishops than from the pope. He viewed heretics as in league with demons, and his treatment of them was in important ways more ruthless than Gui's: he had a lower threshold for the use of torture, he recommended tricks that the inquisitor could play on suspects, and he was less interested than Gui in securing penitence. His manual discussed not just particular heresies but the concept of heresy, and it gave intellectual justification for inquisition. The heresies Gui dealt with were mainly the Cathars and the Waldensians, both long familiar as international movements of dissent from the Church's orthodoxy. Even as Gui wrote, however, the range of heresies was becoming expanded, and by Eymerich's time it had come to include radical Franciscans or Béguins, individual thinkers such as Ramon Llull, potentially magicians and blasphemers. Eymerich...