Click on a thumbnail to go to Google Books.
Loading... Heresy in the Later Middle Ages - Vol 2by Gordon Leff
None Loading...
Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. no reviews | add a review
No library descriptions found. |
Current DiscussionsNonePopular covers
Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)273.09Religions History, geographic treatment, biography of Christianity Doctrinal controversies & heresiesLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
Is this you?Become a LibraryThing Author. |
Since the publication of Lea's History of the Inquisition in 1888,
there has been no comprehensive work on medieval heresy which also
embraced the later middle ages. The present book is the first largescale
modern treatment of this later period. It attempts a synthesis,
based in the main upon original sources, but along different lines
from Lea's narrative approach. As the sub-title of his book indicates,
Dr Leff sees medieval heresy as springing predominantly from the
prevailing outlook of medieval society. Far from being something
alien or-initially at least-clandestine, it had its sources in the tensions
between Christian theory and practice and the desire to overcome
them. The author has thereupon treated the emergence of the main
later medieval heresies in the context of the dominant doctrinal
and spiritual themes of the period These have been grouped under
the three heads of Poverty and Prophecy, Union with God, and the
True Church, into which the book is divided. Each part examines both
the intellectual and spiritual antecedents as well as the heresy
associated with them; and the development of a sect, or sects, is
traced from its, usually, nonheretical origins to its final demise,
or, in the case of the Hussites and Waldensians, survival. There are
separate sections, or chapters, on the leading thinkers, Joachim of Fiore,
St Bonaventure, Peter John Olivi,
Eckhart and Wyclif, as well as the doctrines of the Ockhamists,
Marsilius of Padua and the Conciliarist writers.
The first part is concerned with the disputes in the Franciscan order
leading ultimately to the heresy of the Fraticelli. The second part
includes the first comprehensive modern examination of the heresy
of the Free Spirit. The third part deals with various groups like the
Waldensians, the English Lollards the Hussites (and the Cathars,
incidentally), who either rejected the Roman Church for their
ownseparate communion or sought its radical reform. The book opens with
a Prologue in which the nature and role of medieval heresy are considered
and its development during the 12th and 13th centuries sketched.