Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000-1200

Book excerpt: An intellectual portrait of Europe in the High Middle Ages by one of the great medievalists of this century.The struggle over fundamental issues erupted with great fury in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this book, preeminent medievalist 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 the general population and in the self-confident rationality of the nascent schools. With his characteristic learning and insight, Fichtenau shows how these two separate intellectual phenomena contributed to a medieval 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 eleventh century and ends with the new heretics with scholarly appeal in the late twelfth. He presents the whole spectrum of lay men and women, schoolmen, and members of religious orders who labored to delve into the most basic questions of reality with passion and conviction. While he recognizes some fundamental conditions underpinning the rise both of 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 medieval Christian faith.First published in German in 1991, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages continues a grand traditionof scholarship on the intellectual history of the Middle Ages.