Between Orders and Heresy: Rethinking Medieval Religious Movements

Between Orders and Heresy explores the late medieval religious landscapes, reconsidering Grundmann's binary and challenging traditional interpretive approaches. Contributors examine the social relationships between secular clergy and laypeople, exploring themes such as apostolic ideals, pastoral relationships, crusade connections, vernacular traditions, and reform. The volume historicizes and challenges historiographical tendencies, providing a comprehensive assessment of medieval religious belief and activity.

Format: Hardback
Length: 430 pages
Publication date: 16 June 2022
Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Between Orders and Heresy delves into the vibrant, imaginative, and diverse late medieval religious landscapes that thrived within the confines of social and ecclesiastical structures. This collection reevaluates the arguments presented in Herbert Grundmann's influential book, Religious Movements in the Middle Ages, and challenges his traditional interpretive binary, widely recognized as the common origins of numerous medieval religious movements. The contributors explore the social connections fostered between secular clergy members, including parish priests, local canons, and aristocratic confessors, and examine the ways in which laypeople inspired and engaged in devotion beyond religious orders. Each essay in the volume examines a significant theme in medieval religious history, such as the implementation of apostolic ideals, pastoral relationships, crusade connections, vernacular traditions, and reform. Designed to historicize and challenge the deeply ingrained historiographical tendencies that have long distorted the intricate dynamics of the late medieval world, Between Orders and Heresy constitutes a major assessment of medieval religious belief and activity beyond and between the binary of orders and heresies.

Weight: 816g
Dimension: 161 x 236 x 37 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781487502416