Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages: 1000-1200 Book

The struggle over fundamental issues erupted with great fury in the 11th and 12th centuries. In this book, Henry Fichtenau turns his attention to a new attitude that emerged in Western Europe around the year 1000. This new attitude was exhibited both in the rise of heresy in general population and in the self-confident rationality of the nascent schools. Fichtenau shows how these two separate intellectual phenomena contributed to a mediaeval world that was never quite as uniform as might appear from our modern perspective. Fichtenau's panoramic survey opens with the new heretics with popular appeal in the early 11th century and ends with the hew heretics with scholarly appeal in the late 12th. He presents the spectrum of lay men and women, schoolmen, and members of religious orders who laboured to delve into the most basic questions of reality with passion and conviction. While he recognizes some fundamental conditions underpinning the rise of both heretical movements - particularly the Cathars - as well as Scholastics, he is careful to distinguish the fundamental differences among these groups. Central to these differences is how myth and textuality played a role in their beliefs, what tools they developed to analyze the language of myth (religious or philosophical), and why their speculations were allied with doubt about the mysteries inherent to mediaeval Christian faith. First published in German in 1991, "Heretics and Scholars of High Middle Ages" continues a grand tradition of scholarship on the intellectual history of the Middle Ages.Read More