Catholic Historical Review 

About: Catholic Historical Review is an academic journal published by The Catholic University of America Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Politics & Protestantism. It has an ISSN identifier of 0008-8080. Over the lifetime, 1987 publications have been published receiving 6450 citations.

Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc

Abstract: Inquisition and Power. Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc. By John H. Arnold (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. 2001. Pp. ix, 311.) John Arnold has chosen as his epigraph this passage from T.J. Jackson Lears: Studying consumers through the eyes of market researchers is a little like studying heretics through the eyes of inquisitors: it can be a useful and indeed indispensable practice . . . but we cannot pretend . . . that the statements constitute the clear and unmediated voice of the people . . . that the inquisitors have vanished from the scene without leaving a trace. Arnold takes issue with those scholars who have uncritically accepted the evidence of inquisition witnesses, ignoring the circumstances in which their depositions were made. He seeks to evaluate the inquisition records from Languedoc in a more balanced way by using the methodology of Michel Foucault. Foucault was concerned to examine the connection between power and knowledge and argued that power was exercised by elite groups, such as doctors, through the use of linguistic and symbolic conventions which claimed to be cohesive and authoritative, which he described as discourses. Arnold takes the reader fully into his confidence, and Part I of his book (pp. 1-110) is spent chiefly in examining the sources and explaining the problems which they present when interpreted in Foucault's terms. He rightly argues that the southern French records may be considered as a unit, since although the inquisitors did not form part of an organization, they all exercised identical powers as papal judges delegate, they all sought to enforce the same body of law, and they all used, broadly speaking, the same methods, set out in handbooks which some of them had written. Moreover, since clear evidence about the use of torture "is very infrequently found within the Languedocian records" (p. 31), it can be assumed that most examinations were conducted in the same way. Arnold argues that: "The inquisitors during . . . the thirteenth century, formulated a discourse about heresy and transgression and laid claim to a privileged authority for that language" (p. 90). Consequently, witnesses who gave evidence within this framework of questioning would reinforce the picture of Catharism which the inquisitors already held and on which their questions were based, whereas the witnesses' own understanding of that faith might have been rather different. This approach seems simplistic. Although heresy was often described in terms of a disease by the medieval Church, the inquisitors were not in the position of doctors, whose technical medical vocabulary was not contested. As is clear from their own writings, the Cathars had their own language of power and taught their followers to challenge the Catholic understanding of traditional Christian theological concepts such as creation and incarnation. Encounters between well-instructed Cathar believers and inquisitors often turned into verbal duels because each side had their own language of power. This enabled suspects to give evasive and equivocal answers to the inquisitors, a point well illustrated in the manual of Bernard Gui. In Part II of his book Arnold applies his interpretative theory to the records. He argues that the true opinions of the deponents may be found in what he terms "the excess of words," the replies given by deponents which go beyond what the inquisitors asked, and which therefore enable the witness to break free from the inquisitorial discourse. Using this method, he offers evidence of what Catharism meant to some believers, and the extent to which this differed from the inquisitors' view of their involvement in that faith, which was based on what they knew about the official teaching of the Cathar hierarchy. For example, the consolamentum, which both the inquisitors and the Cathar perfect regarded as the Cathar sacrament of salvation, was viewed by some believers, Arnold argues, as a rite of passage whose significance was as much social as religious. …

The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity by Teresa M. Shaw (review)

Abstract: The Burden of the Flesh: Fasting and Sexuality in Early Christianity. By Teresa M. Shaw. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press. 1998. Pp. x, 298. $27.00 paperback.) Teresa Shaw explores a topic not always approached with either sympathy or style, and she offers both in abundance. The book is beautifully written, clear in its detail, and soundly structured. It is marked at every turn by shrewdness and respect. Neither her interest nor her approach is entirely novel. She has followed consciously and explicitly in the steps of Aline Rousselle, for example, and Peter Brown. What she adds to the debate, however, is more than polish. Her own words signal her breadth of reference: "Arguments concerning the effects of diet on the condition of the body and the soul interweave with eschatological images . . ., with instructions for the daily practice of female chastity and with the theological interpretation of creation, embodiment and gender" (p. 2). The insistent awareness, in particular, of human origins and final destiny colored every facet of early Christian experience. As the author puts it, in perhaps the best part of her book, "Ascetic discipline looks back to the garden and forward to the kingdom" (p. 163). It is such a gathering of threads from practical (particularly medical) endeavor, from the formulae of faith, and from scriptural exegesis that gives the book its distinctive authority. While the focus is on fasting, one is reminded constantly of implications elsewhere. The range of Dr. Shaw's allusions (which reach back to Hesiod) is harnessed always to a clear-sighted understanding of enduring human anxieties. Herein lies her sympathy. Her patient and illuminating analysis of texts depends always on taking seriously the motives of those who wrote them. She has no wish to impose a modern sense of outrage or 'correctness' on ancient practice. While explanations remain strange to us, the urgent response to experience is instantly recognizable. Above all, Dr. Shaw rejects the glib assumption that we witness in this period the dethroning of classical rationalism. To appeal, however, to Hesiod, Plutarch, Galen, or Porphyry is not to deny that Christians gave a specific twist to long-standing traditions. Their apparent preoccupation with sex has absorbed scholars for some time; but here we have a firmer step forward in explaining that focus. The question can be posed, whether Christian virginity represented a refinement of tradition, making explicit a latent concern, or whether, nervous about sexuality on other grounds, Christians visited upon an inherited tradition an extraneous fascination. Dr. Shaw would argue that neither question quite hits the mark. The biblical myth of the Fall echoes, without merely aping, a sense of loss already abroad in the ancient world. Christianity did not originate people's willingness to blame on that primal disappointment whatever they found unnerving or distasteful in their current experience. What is remarkable about the Christian version, as Dr. Shaw shows, is the optimism inspired by the body: a gendered enveloping of the flesh entirely capable of untainted union in the lost paradise, and destined to regain that poise and harmony in the final days. 'Gender' is all, for men were as involved as women in those losses and redemptions. Unfortunately, as we now know well, it is hard to discover what women thought about such matters. Neither their pain nor their wisdom is easily accessible. The accounts provided by men, however, stylized and insensitive though they may be, did subvert a traditional way of looking at women's lives. They may also tell us something about men. 'Sexuality' in this book does mean women's sexuality; and one might ask whether this privileging of the female arena has not skewed the picture, has not obscured what women shared with men in ascetic culture. The imperfection of the female body, the intricacies of its warm, wet structure, certainly fed the urge to fast; but men fasted also, and was that not, for all their contrasting `normality something to do with their passion, their bodies, their sex? …

The anger of the abbots in the thirteenth century

Abstract: The thirteenth century was witness to a variety of assaults on monastic privileges. Lay rulers attempted to restrict further accumulation of property by abbeys and to coerce the religious into deflecting their charity into paths that directly served the material interests of the Crown. Bishops relentlessly attacked the exemption of many individual monasteries and of whole orders from episcopal supervision and jurisdiction. The abbots fought back furiously and with modest success in the thirteenth century, but developments in the later Middle Ages and the early-modern period rendered even this partial success ephemeral.

From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary (review)

Abstract: From Judgment to Passion: Devotion to Christ and the Virgin Mary. By Rachel Fulton. (New York: Columbia University Press. 2002. Pp. xx, 676; 8 plates. $40.00.) The subject of this book-the origin and development of medieval European devotion to the crucified Christ and to his grieving mother-should make it indispensable to intellectual historians and to students of medieval Christianity. Its provocative and elegant argument about the reasons that that development took place when it did and the contribution it made to human feeling invite readers to join its author in interpretation and evaluation of the evidence. Rachel Fulton's clarity of thought and thoroughness of explication make her study as compelling as it is challenging; her graceful authorial voice, which combines scholarly authority with colloquial crispness, makes the book also unusually accessible. Fulton, associate professor of history at the University of Chicago, explores and quotes extensively from the principal authors of doctrinal and devotional texts from the ninth through the thirteenth centuries. While the book adheres to the chronological and thematic outline suggested by the title, its structure embodies the two primary aspects of the question: the development of devotion to Christ ("Christus Patiens") and to his mother ("Maria Compatiens"). The first portion has three chapters ("History, Conversion, and the Saxon Christ," "Apocalypse, Reform, and the Suffering Savior," and "Praying to the Crucified Christ"); the second follows a brief introduction with five chapters ("Praying to the Mother of the Crucified Judge," "The Seal of the Mother Bride," "The Voice of my Beloved, Knocking," "Once upon a Time," and "Commoriens, Commortua, Consepulta"). These chapter titles signal the major themes of the book: language, instruction, and interpretation; disappointed millennial anticipation when Christ the Judge did not appear in 1033; Mary's dual roles as mother and bride; the role of story in creating relationship between believer/ devotee and Christ and his mother, and the centuries-long movement from imitative propitiation of Christ the crucified judge to compassion for his suffering. A focus on the linguistic nature of the Incarnation runs as a golden thread through the book, whose first line enunciates the point: "For medieval Christians, the great mystery of the Incarnation was first and foremost linguistic: 'And the Word became flesh and lived among us' (John 1:14)" (p.xv). This is Fulton's principal subtext, that not only is medieval devotion to Christ and Mary revealed in language but that that language is imbricated with such devotion, that devotion translates doctrine, and that medieval devotion was understood to inscribe on the believer's flesh a corporeal memory of Christ's loving sacrifice. Finally Fulton identifies Christian devotion with the search to understand the story of the faith: "the exegete's art itself recapitulates the art of devotion; . . . the effort to become one in understanding with a text (Scripture, the Word of God) itself recapitulates the effort to become one with the object of devotion" (p. 468). In her study of the medieval growth of empathy within the narrative of the life and Passion of Jesus, Fulton relies on empathy as an essential tool. She begins the book with the story of her response to a crucifix in Salzburg: "a feeling of sweetness, and of sorrow, of longing to be closer to the beauty of the man depicted so dying . . ." (p. 1). She then enters her exploration of the past with a long paragraph rejecting the caution that denies scholars the ability to understand people of the past: "to refuse the interpretive leap into the past . . . is to presume that human beings of the historical past are (were) so irredeemably 'Other' that there is no possibility of empathy in our encounter with them other than of the mostly reductive kind . …