In a session on witchcraft at the last SCSC, Michael Bailey raised a question about the relationship between the late medieval Reformatio and the Reformation. His question was interesting in the way it was presented -- the standard sources and narrative of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tends to make what happens in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries look inevitable. At the same time, the nature of the sources and the historiography tend to lead to create stark distinctions between the two periods -- rarely if ever do scholars make a concerted effort to bridge the gap between "late medieval" and "early modern." He was speaking specifically about witchcraft and the way early modern scholars treat the Malleus Malificarum, but his general point remains, I think, valid for Reformation history generally.
Here I want to recast his question: what place (if any) do earlier heretical movements -- here I'm thinking of the Waldensians and Hussites, but also the Beguines, Beghards, "Free Spirit" devotees (if they even existed), Fraticelli, Radical Joachimites, Lollards, etc. -- have in the narrative of the capital "R" Reformation? What place ought we accord in our teaching and research to such movements?
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This is a question I've been considering with regard to the beginning of the eucharistic controversy. In his new book, Cornelius Henrici Hoen (Honius) and his Epistle on the Eucharist (1525), B.J. Spruyt argues that Hoen's ideas (which helped convince Zwingli and Bucer to adopt a symbolic understanding of the Lord's Supper), were derived from these medieval heresies, rather than from the circle associated with the Devotio Moderna, as is usually assumed. Are there other areas of theology and praxis where such connections have been overlooked?
Sometimes I wonder, too, whether heresies are a kind of by-product of the way in which orthodoxies define themselves and frame their discussion.
For example, the mediaeval scholastic definition of a sacrament inherited from Augustine, with its sacramentum and its res suited Baptism well. The water signifed and caused grace, but wasn't itself grace. Same with the other sacraments. The eucharist, however, kind of messed things up: the sacramentum was also in some sense the res and so you had to come up with further special qualifications for the eucharist.
I suspect a tidy-minded individual might naturally wonder from time to time, whether a more symbolic account didn't work better. This might be helped by the existence of condemnations like the Ego Berengarius or even the condemnations of Wyclif and Hus.
This probably doesn't exclude the existence of parallel heretical traditions, but my hunch is that they were simultaneously parasitic on the orthodox mainstream.
Great blog by the way! There's been a real need for something like this.
cheers,
Nick Thompson
University of Aberdeen
Since I see the MA as a time of connected renaissances and reformation movements (seriously, is there one medieval renaissance that isn't accompanied by a reformation?), I include them whenever I have the luxury of teaching a class that allows for more than Luther, Calvin, and Henry VIII. It may also have to do with a particularly good course I did on the English church which started with Chaucer.
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