Power and Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy.

Carol Lansing. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 267 pp. $45. [SBN: 0-19-506391-0.

Italian Cathars and their sixteenth-century heretical cousins do not have much in common, despite Carol Lansing's rather implausible concluding suggestion that Catharist ideas of human perfection somehow fed into Renaissance humanism. Nevertheless, these two books do share similar social-historical, even microhistorical, approaches to their material.

Susanna Peyronel Rambaldi, expert in the history of religious dissent in Modena, offers the second modern edition in a decade of the Sommario. Hers improves on Cesare Bianco's by using the oldest known printed text, rendered with most orthographical and lexical variants. It also adds almost three hundred pages of commentary, which sometimes ranges more widely than the Sommario probably did across the variegated terrain of Italian heresy, mainly in the north, but including one quick glance at Naples.

The book begins with a close reading of some of the Sommario, building on the work of Johannes Trapman, by which the author demonstrates how the basically Erasmian material of the book was radicalized by a liberal application of Luther, especially on justification by faith. Most significant, this reinterpretation highlights the book's socially subversive nature through its strong anticlericalism and thoroughgoing application of Luther's doctrine of the priesthood of all believers, leading to the conclusion that the laity, engaged in whatever kind of work, were the true church, and all equal. This claim had the further consequence that concern for the poor, no longer a meritorious work, was nonetheless vital. Peyronal Rambaldi parallels these and other central ideas to those of other reformers, especially Martin Butzer, if less convincingly.

The original version of the Sommario was written in Dutch by an unknown author, possibly a monk. The four Italian editions known (Peyronel Rambaldi adding three of them) descend from a lost French translation, published at Antwerp in 1528-29. The Italian translator reworked his original mainly by toning down its polemics, emphasizing its scriptural content (usually quoting from the Vulgate in Latin), and otherwise adapting it to an Italian audience likely not to be familiar with northern ideas of reform. He remains anonymous, although Peyronel Rambaldi suggests with due diffidence that he may have been the poligrafo Ortensio Lando, a suggestion she supports by tracking the work's popularity in Lando's circles of Augustinian hermits.

The rest of the introduction is devoted to an attempt to determine who read the Sommario and how. Here the author draws especially on inquisitorial records, usually handling them with care especially when they postdate the Sommario's first arrival. A methodological tension inevitably arises between this vaguely Rezeptionsgeschichte and an older style of source-hunting, the approach Peyronel Rambaldi usually takes. And as usually happened to students of influence in the past, the parallels she suggests often Seem forced, perhaps especially since the heavily biblical content of the Sommario can make it very difficult to distinguish between it and the scriptures themselves. Yet Peyronel Rambaldi documents to an impressive degree the work's circulation in Italy, often in tandem with the Beneficio di Christo and Antonio Brucioli's translation of the New Testament.

It is no more accidental that those three works moved together than that Ambrogio Catarino Politi, OP, saw identical heresy in all three. His attacks on the Sommario, which like the Beneficio was once part of the material assembled in Verona by Gianmatteo Giberti and Tullio Crispoldi in order to forward the reform of that diocese, produced even quicker results, with the Sommario first being condemned in 1538. Despite this precocious condemnation, the work remained popular, especially among just the audience at which - despite its Latin - it was aimed: simple Christians. In Capodistria under Pier Paolo Vergerio, Venice, Udine, and Modena (her principal test cases) the work helped to reinforce a wide range of heretical beliefs, at the same time as it fostered social solidarity, sometimes cutting across class lines, especially at Modena.

One of the book's most valuable contributions is the challenges its microhistorical approach presents to broader-gauge interpretations, whether those of Massimo Firpo, Silvana Seidel Menchi, or Paolo Simoncelli. It is a most welcome addition to the literature of the "missing" Italian Reformation.

Lansing's book is not as successful. Allegedly about Italian Cathars, it focuses on Orvieto, supported by much comparative material. Part of the reason for its inclusion seems less to expand the scope of the work than to make up for the severe limitations of the Orvietan sources. Although Cathars apparently turned up there as early as ca. 1200, the first inquisitorial records date only from 1268. Similarly, although Lansing proposes to place her Cathars in social and political context, the shortcomings of the local records are well illustrated by her ability to identify only three Cathars as from merchant families (really only two, since one of these was guilty through his son), a result which nevertheless helps to support the conclusion that Catharist ideas of self-restraint appealed to rising commercial classes.

The results are often weakly supported and Lansing's argument far too often depends on perhapses, must-have-beens, and surelys, but she still raises important questions, directly challenging nearly all prevailing interpretations. Rather than originating in the fading military nobility and then spreading vertically downward through networks of clientage, Catharism ramified horizontally from minor urban nobility, merchants, and the upper ranks of the artisanate, especially furriers. Perhaps most important, and very much alla moda, Lansing substitutes for dichotomous interpretations a dialectical one, in which political and religious motives are not mutually exclusive but mark off a spectrum. Her thesis is that Catharism arose in a climate of doubt and scepticism with which both it and Catholicism (she admits the anachronism of this term) wrestled, helped along by political resistance to papal pretensions and the development of communal institutions. At one end of the spectrum was Catharist rejection of the body, both human and divine in the form of the Eucharist, at the other Catholic insistence on its sanctity as expressed in marriage, the devotion of Corpus Domini (proclaimed in Orvieto) or in the reliefs on the facade of its new cathedral, interpreted as explicitly anti-Catharist in their celebration of divine and human creativity and generativity. Again, Catharist disdain for carnality broke down gender distinctions, allowing women to become "perfects" and leaders, while Catholic resurgence both repressed heresy and normalized gender, putting women back in their place. And all of this served to prop up new assertions of ecclesiastical and political authority, although the precise links between Catharism and its suppression and manifestations of papal and communal authority could often be clearer.

The most uniformly successful section is chapter 7 which defends the thesis that the Orvietans in practice tolerated Cathars. Lansing also suggests the potential for toleration in Catharism itself, largely on the example of a Bolognese heretic who alleged that just as there are seventy-two languages on earth, so there are seventy-two religions, and none has a superior claim over any other. This point supports the effort launched by Caty Nederman and others to reinterpret the Middle Ages as not exclusively intolerant. Lansing also offers some valuable thoughts about how the inquisitors worked, illustrated through their successful repression of the Orvietan Cathars, partly through moderation, partly through their knowledge of the local scene. Against James Given's Foucauldian idea of "technologies of power" being applied to the heretics, Lansing suggests attention to enforcement and the parallel effort to redefine heretics as undesirable.

Perhaps the least satisfying section is chapter 5, a reconstruction of Catharist belief. Since Lansing has the confession of exactly one Orvietan Cathar, the outlook was never promising. Instead, she works from Florentine and Bolognese materials, with a liberal dollop of one famous case from Toulouse (and a nod toward Montaillou). She alleges that she has constructed a "rough Cathar orthodoxy" (84) which she juxtaposes to "the medieval Catholic reading of the Bible" (86). On her own evidence there is no such thing as the first, and at least since Beryl Smalley medievalists have known that the second is a chimera.

Augustana College