Elsewhere it was otherwise. In Ad extirpanda, Innocent IV laid down the rule that the proceeds were to be divided into three equal portions, a third to go to the local authorities, a third to the officials of the Inquisition, a third to bishop and inquisitor.432 Latterly, in Italy, a different tripartite division was made, the third which had originally gone to bishop and inquisitor having to be paid to the pope. The question of distribution was complicated by feudal considerations, the feudal lord being able to put forward a claim to any forfeited possessions of his vassal. But, however much the allocation of these revenues might vary, it was always understood that they were to be utilized for the prosecution of the war against heresy, and in particular the defraying of the expenses of the Inquisition.
The secular princes no doubt played their part. They had every inducement to do so. It is always good policy, if not to stimulate, at all events to preserve, the goose that lays the golden eggs.433 But, neither with regard to the action of the secular princes nor of the Inquisition, is it desirable to over-estimate the significance of the pecuniary penances and penalties suffered by the heretic. It is no doubt true that their importance used to be under-estimated, when the tendency was to rivet attention on the stake and torture-chamber in dealing with the Inquisition. It is also true that the opportunity of reaping mercenary profit from the prosecution of heresy was an encouragement to cupidity. It is only in human nature that it should be so. It may be true to say that ‘persecution, as a steady and continuous policy, rested, after all, upon confiscation.’434 But that is not necessarily to say more than that the Inquisition had to meet its expenses in some way or other; and it was not unnatural to put to those expenses the proceeds of pecuniary penalties imposed directly by, or indirectly resulting from, the sentences of the tribunal. Confiscation was a very customary expedient in the Middle Ages, and once granted the Church’s reasonable analogy, on its own premises, between heresy and treason, it was an inevitable accompaniment of inquisitorial practice. That extortion and avarice were likely to be excited by the scheme is true; but to suggest avarice as a prime motive in the prosecution of heresy is quite to overshoot the mark.435 The Church did not embark upon the destruction of Catharism because it coveted the wealth of Cathari, but because it felt it must preserve itself against a movement, which it regarded as anti-religious, anti-social and immoral.436 In the second place, it must be remembered that the majority of mediæval heretical sects consisted of poor men. Only rarely was a rich man a heretic, and Fraticelli, Beguines, Dolcinists and most of the later sects, ardently persecuted by the Inquisition as they were, were certainly not worth pursuing from the point of view of the material profit to be derived thereby. Eymeric, lamenting the dearth of heretics of substance in Spain in his day to help the tribunal to pay its way, deals cursorily with the subject of confiscation as one scarcely affecting the inquisitor at all.437
The most severe of the inquisitorial penances was that of imprisonment: but it is a penance. The idea is that, left in solitude, where he is out of reach of heretical contamination and has time to reflect on his offence, where in the simple life sustained on bread and water there are no worldly distractions, the penitent may be enabled by the aid of ghostly counsel to make a sincere return to the bosom of the Church. Bernard de Caux used this penance frequently; it would appear that he enjoined it upon all who did not voluntarily surrender within the time of grace.438 This was the ruling laid down by the Council of Narbonne (1244), which ruthlessly declared that no arguments of mercy against the infliction were to be considered, such as the dependence of his family upon the heretic, nor illness, nor old age. The Council of Béziers, two years later, reiterated this principle, but recommended lenience where the penance might involve death to dependents. Imprisonment was also frequently the penalty for failure to carry out penances previously imposed. In the sentences of Bernard de Caux a large percentage are for perpetual imprisonment. In Languedoc, to meet the necessities of the battle with Catharism, the Council of Narbonne ruled that imprisonment should always be for life. The tribunal did not at the time possess the resources to render the execution of this order practicable. At a later period it appears to have been carried out.
There were different degrees in the severity of the imprisonment. The most lenient form, known as murus largus, allowed of the prisoner’s leaving his cell, taking exercise in the corridors and holding conversation with other prisoners, similarly privileged, possibly also with friends from outside the prison. Much less desirable was the lot of the penitent consigned to murus strictus. Placed in a cell of the smallest size and worst description, dark and unsavoury, in some cases chained by both hands and feet, he was not permitted ever to leave his cell. This severer form of imprisonment was reserved for those whose offence had been especially conspicuous and therefore especially scandalous and dangerous to the faith and for those whose confessions had not been wholly satisfactory, complete and open.439
Mediæval prisons were all of them apt to be horrible places, and it does not appear that those used by the Inquisition were more noisome than others. That they were terrible enough we know: as for example from the report, as to the conditions in the Cour de l’Inquisition in Carcassonne, made by the papal commissioners in 1305.440 From other evidence it appears that harsh severity was laid down as a rule for the treatment by gaolers of their charges.441 And, as a general rule, there was little supervision of the prisons, and their inmates had small chance of redress against ill-treatment. Only the strong ventilation of an alert public opinion can find its way into the dark recesses of prison life: there was no public opinion in the Middle Ages interested in the wrongs of the heretic. It does not appear that there was separate accommodation provided for those awaiting trial apart from the condemned. It is only right to add, however, that the Inquisition sanctioned the giving of presents of food and drink, clothing and cash from outside friends to the prisoners, so that they were not wholly dependent upon the diet of bread and water, which was all that the prisons provided.
The Inquisition was apt to find itself in difficulties with regard to the funds necessary for the maintenance of its prisoners. The prisons the tribunal itself built were of the cheapest, and consequently of the most insanitary, description. In France there were few specifically inquisitorial prisons, those belonging to the secular and episcopal authorities being utilized. Prior to the absorption of Languedoc into the French monarchy at the Peace of Paris, the cost of building and maintaining prisons in that country had been borne partly by the bishops, partly by the holders of confiscated property.442 Probably after 1230 the lot of heretic prisoners in Languedoc sensibly improved. In Italy the Inquisition seems to have been able to meet such expenses out of the proceeds of confiscation.
A penalty frequently met with in the early days of the Inquisition is that of banishment. Originally used in the Roman empire by the civil authority against Arians, Nestorians, Manichæans, it was ordered by the Council of Rheims in 1157 against heretics, incorporated in the Assize of Clarendon, in the edict of Verona, and in those of Alfonso II and Pedro II of Aragon. On the surface it appeared an excellent method of ridding a country of the contamination of heresy. But to banish from one country was merely to introduce the virus of the scourge into another. The effect was simply to spread the epidemic. In the second place, banishment was a confession of failure, as it gave no promise of amendment upon the part of the individual: which was ever the inquisitor’s object. Hence he preferred imprisonment of the heretic to his banishment, holding him fast to getting rid of him.
Heresy, being regarded as essentially anti-social, involved exclusion from civil rights. The heretic could hold no office in Church and State, could hold no title or honour of any kind. If a father, his natural authority over his children was rendered invalid; if a husband, he no longer had legal authority over his wife; if a king, he forfeited the obedience of his subjects; if a baron, the vassalage of his tenants. He could not succeed to property or, having it, leave it by will. His debtors need pay him nothing. The incapacity to hold office in the State affected not only the offender himself, but descendants of the second generation in the paternal, the first generation in the maternal, line.443
The idea of the taint of heresy is apparent in another penalty which the inquisitor was competent to inflict the destruction of houses which had harboured heretical inmates or been the scene of heretical meetings.444 This penalty is less a punishment than a symbolical act, expressive of the Church’s horror of heresy; an attempt to blot out the very memory of the offence. This practice, sanctioned in Roman law, was enjoined by the Assize of Clarendon, by the Emperor Henry VI in the edict of Prato of 1195, by Frederick II in 1232. It was consecrated by the Church in the days of Innocent III. Innocent IV actually demanded the demolition, not only of the house in which the heretic had been found, but also of neighbouring houses, if they belonged to the same property; a stringent rule modified by Alexander IV. The houses must never be rebuilt, and more, the places where they had stood must remain unused for other building. There was just one saving clause: the stones of the demolished houses might be used for pious purposes.445 Had these regulations been literally carried out, it is obvious that whole towns might have been devastated and remained waste. But it is evident that the rules were not fulfilled to the letter. They were made to apply in Languedoc to houses in which definite heretical acts had taken place, such as the Catharan heretication. Even so, the secular arm was not disposed to approve of a penalty which not only did material damage, but diminished the yield of confiscations. Both France and Germany protested; and eventually the inquisitors agreed to issue licences to build on the sites of the demolished houses.446
So far we have dealt, on the whole, with penalties incurred by those who, in the end, became reconciled to the Church—those who confessed, performed their penance in token of contrition and promised amendment. But there were also those who did not become reconciled. They fall under three headings—the contumacious, the impenitent, the relapsed.
As regards the first, the Inquisition adopted the rule of Roman law. If the accused, being cited three times or given one peremptory summons to appear, failed to do so, he was reckoned as contumacious. The penalty was excommunication and forfeiture of goods. This sentence would be annulled in the event of the accused’s surrendering himself to the tribunal within the space of a year from the date of the citation.447 Otherwise, he was liable, on falling into the hands of the Inquisition, as an excommunicate, to be handed over to the secular arm.
With the stubborn impenitent, resisting up to the last all efforts of the Church to bring him back to her bosom, there was obviously nothing to be done. But the inquisitor, to whom relaxation to the secular arm was an admission of defeat, left no means untried, of persuasion, admonition, force, to avoid such failure. His reluctance to hand over the heretic as a hopeless recalcitrant, was in most cases perfectly genuine. Even after the sentence of relaxation had been pronounced, indeed after the culprit had actually been handed over, the slightest sign of willingness to repent might suffice to save the victim.448 Eymeric mentions one case in which a heretic, consigned to the flames at Barcelona, being scorched on one side, cried out in his agony that he would recant, and was at once removed from the fire.449
The relapsed were those who, having once erred and been received back into communion, sinned in the same way again. These were incorrigible. Their former repentance had manifestly been a mere sham, and the outrage cried to heaven. Repetition of the sin of heresy could not be suffered.450 Accordingly the relapsed were the only class of offenders coming before the Holy Office who could not save themselves by penitence. Relapse came to involve relaxation automatically. But it had not been so at first, perpetual imprisonment being the penalty originally enjoined, for example by the Councils of Tarragona and Béziers. By 1258, however, relaxation had come to be recognized as the sole possible reward for relapse.451
Relaxation to the secular arm meant death, and death by burning. The inquisitor himself, who did not and could not pronounce a death sentence, knew, on the other hand, that a sentence of relaxation was tantamount to one of death.
It is true that he made use of a formula,452 expressing a desire that lenience might be shown to the victim; and that some apologists have based upon this the contention that the ecclesiastical tribunal was in no way responsible for the death penalty; urging, on the one hand, that the desire that the relaxed heretic might not suffer either death or mutilation was perfectly genuine, on the other that the lay authority was entirely independent in the matter, pronouncing and executing its own sentence, based on a decision of its own, not the Inquisition’s relaxation; and that, should it decide to spare the life of the heretic, the Church would make no complaint, but quite the contrary.453
The theory cannot be accepted. The attitude of Gregory IX and Innocent IV towards Frederick II’s Constitutions, and the bulls, Cum adversus haereticam and Ad extirpanda, are really decisive in the matter.454 But there is additional clear proof that the formula of leniency was an empty formula, intended merely to preserve technical conformity with the Canon.455 In the first place, what appropriate punishment for the contumacious, the impenitent, the relapsed could there be short of death? Even the contrite heretic, received back into the fold, may have to undergo so severe a penance as perpetual imprisonment. If the Church metes out to the contrite punishment as severe as the impenitent has to face, she is putting a premium upon impenitence. The simple fact that perpetual imprisonment is numbered among the penances inflicted by the Inquisition is proof positive that the Inquisition desired and anticipated from the secular arm the death penalty for those relaxed to it. For careless as to the ultimate fate of the impenitent the Church cannot possibly be. She cannot be willing that he should go free to rejoice in the triumph of his obduracy among confederates and to spread contagion among the faithful. Shall he be banished by the secular authority? To what end? Banishment only means the spread of infection. Shall he, then, be imprisoned by the secular authority? Again, to what end? The Inquisition can imprison as well as the State. It is a strange obtuseness that does not see that the whole attitude of the Inquisition to the heretic points logically, and indeed inevitably, to death as the fate of the obdurate. The tribunal had been created, and it existed, to the end that heresy might be exterminated. To have failed to secure that those who to the last resisted all its most strenuous efforts to obtain confession and reconciliation must expect a worse fate than those who proved compliant would have stultified its very existence.
As a matter of fact, the Church saw to it, that the penalty meted out by the secular arm to the relaxed was death. Hardly ever did the secular ruler show any reluctance to inflict it. But if he forbore, he would probably be excommunicated.456 Ever after the Fourth Council of the Lateran the Church made it incumbent upon the lay power to carry out the imperial edicts against heresy. The formula of mercy, then, may be called either a ‘legal fiction’ or bluntly, a ‘hypocrisy’: it was never intended to be taken literally.457 The scrupulous regard of the Church for regularity in accordance with the Canon showed susceptibility to decorum; as a repudiation of moral responsibility it would have been contemptible.
But the mediæval Church did not repudiate such responsibility, as some of its modern apologists have sought to do. Had it disapproved of the penalty of death for the obdurate heretic, it both could and would have said so. Nay, more. It possessed the authority and practical power to have prevented it. To doubt that is to attribute to the mediæval Church infinitely less influence than it actually possessed. A papacy, claiming and at times exercising authority in matters temporal as well as spiritual, could have brought pressure to bear upon the secular power in a matter peculiarly the Church’s concern. The fact that it never made any attempt to do so is proof that it never desired to.
As a matter of fact, the Church in the Middle Ages felt no such squeamishness, as is natural in these modern days of religious toleration, regarding the drastic punishment of errors in intellectu. Once granted the point of view that heresy is a more heinous offence than coining—to use St. Thomas’ analogy—or than treason, to use a commoner and more forcible comparison, and the penalty of death for heresy appears not shocking and horrible, but something eminently just and proper. We may take St. Thomas as representative of the best thought of the Church on the subject in the Middle Ages. Later inquisitors were quite unequivocal in their language. ‘Pertinax non tantum est relaxandus, sed etiam vivus a saeculari potestate conburendus.’458 Simancas, likewise, has no qualms. The best human law demands the burning of the heretic; in this according with the divine law. Christ is quoted in proof. ‘Igne igitur extirpanda est haeretica pubis: ne nobis Deus irascitur, si haereticos dimittimus impunitos.’459 A favourite line of argument was that adopted by Ludovico à Paramo, in comparing the Church to the ark of Noah. As God utterly destroyed the unbelievers outside the Ark by a deluge, so now does he destroy the heretic.460 It is modern humanitarianism, not Inquisitorial authorities, that seeks to disclaim moral responsibility for the stake.
The outward and visible sign of the Church’s approval was its participation in the ceremony of execution. This took place frequently as part of a great and elaborate function known as the sermo generalis or ‘act of faith’—the auto-da-fé of the Spanish Inquisition. There could be a sermo generalis without an execution. A burning was not the essential feature of the ceremony. The auto had humble beginnings. In the early days of the Inquisition in Toulouse there might be one every week or so. In rapid, business-like fashion the sentences against heretics were pronounced in the presence of the civil and ecclesiastical officers. But in course of time the proceedings came to be much more elaborate, the object being to impress the popular mind. The sermo generalis usually took place on a Sunday and inside a church, a platform being erected upon which the culprits were placed. The ceremony, which started in the early morning, began with a sermon appropriate to the occasion, preached by an inquisitor. After this an indulgence was announced for all who had come to take part in the solemnity; the civil magistrates took an oath of fidelity, and excommunication was fulminated against all who had in any way thwarted the Inquisition in the pursuance of its labours. Next the confessions of the penitents were read, followed by the recital of the form of abjuration, which they repeated word by word. It does not appear that they wore any such distinctive garb as was customary in the Spanish Inquisition of later days. The inquisitor then absolved the penitents from the excommunication which their heresy had incurred, the formal sentences were read out, first in Latin, then in the vulgar tongue; after which the culprits were brought forward in order corresponding with the degree of their guilt, beginning with the least guilty and ending with the impenitent and relapsed. For the disposal of the latter adjournment was made to another place, where they were handed over to the lay authorities. The victims destined to pay the last penalty were not at once executed. It was not seemly that the execution should take place on a Sunday, and they were given another night to make their peace with God. The following day they were brought to the stake, accompanied by ghostly comforters, who would earnestly exhort them to penitence, seeing that, except in the case of the relapsed, reconciliation was possible up to the last moment. They were forbidden to exhort the victims to quiet submission for fear that this might suggest that they were doing something to expedite the punishment in store for the heretics.461
This would have been an irregularity. Yet so implicitly did the Church believe in death for the obstinate heretic, that she pursued his body even after death.
For death did not terminate heresy; and it was evidently felt to be obnoxious that anyone who had been a heretic, even though his heresy had never been detected during life, should pass beyond the reach of ecclesiastical justice. Notwithstanding the pronouncement of Ivo of Chartres that the powers of the Church extended only to the present world, by the middle of the thirteenth century it seems to have been generally recognized that the corpses of all persons, whose heresy was discovered only after their demise, were to be dug up and disposed of in accordance with the degree of their guilt.462 In 1209 a synod at Paris caused the body of Amaury de Bène to be flung to the dogs, and in 1237 the bodies of certain heretic nobles were carried through the streets of Toulouse and solemnly burnt.463 The practice seems to have been partly due to a popular feeling that it was a dreadful and scandalous thing that a heretic should be buried in consecrated ground, partly to a desire on the part of the inquisitors to demonstrate their implacable zeal and unlimited power.464
All inquisitorial sentences, with the single exception of death—which, strictly speaking, was not an inquisitorial sentence at all—could be, and frequently were, commuted. Thus for imprisonment is substituted the wearing of crosses in view of the penitent’s having given information about a plot against the inquisitor’s life. The procuring of the capture of other heretics is similarly rewarded.465 Commutation to a lighter penance is allowed to a woman, because she has a number of small children; to a man, because he has a wife and family dependent upon him.466 Such unconditional remitments were rare; temporary alleviations were more frequent.467 Penitents might be allowed to leave prison, for periods varying from a few weeks to two years, on account of child-birth or illness.468 A husband and wife, both in prison for heresy, might be allowed access to one another.469
A right of appeal existed, from the bishop to the metropolitan, from the inquisitor to the Pope. The papacy was at first averse to receiving appeals in cases of heresy, Lucius III in 1185 declaring that he would have none of them.470 When, however, the Inquisition was established, the right was acknowledged. But it was at best of doubtful and partial utility. It was a condition that the appeal must be lodged before the sentence was pronounced. In other words there could be no appeal against a decision of the tribunal. It was valid only as against an alleged injustice in procedure.471 A complaint on the latter ground could easily be rectified by the inquisitors themselves by the simple device of starting the process anew and carefully avoiding the irregularity of which complaint was made. If the inquisitors regarded the appeal as frivolous, they could dismiss it. It is clear that they regarded all appeals as a nuisance, an unwarrantable embarrassment.472 The most successful appeals lodged against the tribunal were those brought by powerful nobles and influential towns.473 For the ordinary person, devoid of influence, the right of appeal offered small hope of deliverance.
We have valuable evidence as to the comparative frequency of the various penances prescribed by the Inquisition. The practice of different inquisitors varied, as was inevitable, when so much was left to the arbitrary decision of the individual judge. But a general computation is possible. Imprisonment, confiscation of property, the wearing of crosses are the sentences that occur most frequently. No inquisitor in the Middle Ages was more vigorous and efficient than Bernard Gui. In a collection of sentences extending over a period of seventeen years, 1308-23, there are 307 of imprisonment, 143 of wearing crosses, 69 of exhumation, 9 of pilgrimages without the wearing of crosses, 40 of condemnation of fugitives as contumacious, 45 of relaxation to the secular arm; i.e. only 45 sentences of relaxation out of 613.474 Another veritable ‘hammer of heretics,’ Bernard de Caux, has left voluminous records of his cases between the years 1246 and 1248. There are a large number of sentences of life imprisonment; not a single mention of relaxation.475 This is very remarkable, as it seems highly unlikely that Bernard de Caux never came across an impenitent in the course of his duties, and the suggestion is at least plausible that the records are incomplete, being only entries of sentences of imprisonment.476 But the clear indication of the evidence is that the number of cases of relaxation must have been comparatively small in the aggregate and very small in comparison with other sentences.
This may appear strange to those whose sole idea of the Inquisition is that of a court mainly concerned with the burning of heretics. Such a conception rests upon a misunderstanding of the object and function of the tribunal. It did not aim at making great holocausts of victims; it desired only to make a few examples. Except in Languedoc, where the heretics were in a majority and powerful, a few examples always sufficed. It sought not vengeance, which was a synonym for failure, but reconciliation, which meant success. More characteristic of the Inquisition than its sentences of relaxation, with their attendant horrible consequence, in reality more effective and perhaps more terrible, was its whole method of procedure, its use of torture, moral as well as physical, the agony of the rack and the nervous strain of prolonged and tortuous examination, its utilization of the humiliation of the cross-wearing, of the dull and hopeless misery of harsh and lengthy imprisonment, by which the spirit of the victim was broken and the purity of the faith preserved.
CHAPTER VI - CONCLUSION
The story of mediæval heresy is but a chapter in a much larger subject, that of the slow and painful development of religious tolerance and freedom of thought. Heresy—essentially free choice in the sphere of religious belief in contradistinction to implicit obedience to doctrinal authority—was a serious problem to the Church in the early centuries of the Christian era. During the long, distracted and desolate epoch of the barbarian invasions it ceased to be a potent factor in history. But when Europe recovered from the malady, the lethargy of the Dark Ages, and the human mind was again awake, it became once more a problem. The rationalistic speculations of Eriugena, Roscellinus and Berengar; the disordered ravings of Tanchelm; the aggressive anti-sacerdotalism of the Cathari or Paulicians, and of the vagrant Waldenses, present us with the three outstanding types of mediæval heresy. By far the most influential, those which the Church recognized as the most hurtful and dangerous, were the last. In the case of the Cathari there was a clear and a very remarkable revival of a heresy that had much afflicted the early Church, Manichæism. Their dualist theology was hopelessly pessimistic; their practical teachings a mere gospel of despair. The crude dualism and perverted antinomianism of the sect contained little indeed that either merited respect or promised lasting influence. Only in the hint of a genuine hatred of the gross and the cruel was there aught to respect; only in its Donatist doctrine and its denunciation of the Catholic clergy was there the likelihood of lasting influence. In their hostility to the claims, and their diatribes against the abuses, of the clergy, Paulicianism and Waldensianism stood united. These two heresies gave a popular currency in the lands where they secured a foothold to anti-sacerdotalism, which involved not only the condemnation of all backsliding on the part of the clergy from the strictest and most rigid interpretation of the Christ-like life, but also—as the result of this—the rejection of the doctrinal basis of the peculiar privileges of the clergy, namely the conception of the mediatorial character of the priesthood. The Arnoldist ‘Poor Men’; the Petrobrusians, insisting on the sole efficacy of the individual’s own faith, unaided by churches and sacraments; the Henricians in their ascetic denunciation of clerical worldliness and rejection of the sacraments; the Poor Men of Lyons, adopting the rule of absolute poverty, preaching in streets and countryside because, although illiterate, they were conscious of an inward vocation, and so being led on to undertake other priestly functions though unordained; the Cathari asserting that the Catholic Church was lost in materialism and worldliness and that they were the true church of Christ—all these were inherently the aggressive enemies of the priesthood. There was a similar note in much of the popular poetry in those southern lands in which these heresies took firmest root. It is a note scornful, defiant, often ribald and profane, that comes into the songs of the goliards and troubadours. With a robust and crude Rabelaisianism they burlesque, not only clerical manners, but the holiest ceremonies and the most sacred doctrines. Even in miracles and mystery plays the note is sometimes heard; in the poems of Rutebeuf, the ‘Roman de la Rose’ and ‘Reynard the Fox,’ it is most resonant. In the popular poetry there is undoubtedly something of the unconsecrated paganism of the average man—his innate secularism rebelling against clerical privilege, when it is not fortified by personal worthiness. Yet between the Provençal troubadour and the Paulician heretic there was something akin; and with the nobleman of Languedoc, only too willing to take the excuse for despoiling the clergy, they were alike popular. We may regret the total extinction of the exotic, semi-Moorish culture of southern France, which the Albigensian crusades involved; we need not regret the virtual extinction, with it, of the heresies.477 If there was something worthy of esteem in their demand for spiritual reality and personal holiness, this was confused with other elements, which were perverted and absurd, sometimes even repulsive and abominable. On their constructive side the heresies of Waldenses and Albigenses had nothing of genuine value to offer. In so far as they have significance, it is because of their anti-clerical elements, which are in part a cause, but more a symptom, of a trend of popular sentiment.
The second type of mediæval heresy is that represented by Tanchelm, Eon de l’Etoile, Segarelli, Dolcino, the Flagellants. It belongs to the province, not of the theologian but of the psychologist, specially interested in the study of depraved emotion and diseased imagination. Its foundation is that perverted sexuality which is so strangely connected, as a matter of psychological fact, with intensity of religious enthusiasm. The cases of Tanchelm and Eon are no doubt cases of simple religious mania. None of the heresies of this type had, or from their character was at all likely to have, any but the most fleeting results. They have, nevertheless, their interest, as symptoms of the powerful emotionalism which seemed equally liable to produce a fierce animalism or an intense religious asceticism. The same raw material of unregenerate sense and passion gave to the Church saints and heresiarchs. Ever in the Middle Ages there was a tendency to excess, excess of self-abnegation, excess of self-indulgence, a tendency to push ideas both of doctrine and conduct to extremes. Thus did the Spiritual Franciscans tend to see in their founder a superman, to make the cult of poverty an obsession, to believe themselves a new order destined to inaugurate the era of the Holy Ghost.
The third type of mediæval heresy is of an altogether different nature. It is intellectual, philosophic. In all the other heresies there is a taint of rottenness, disease. Here, on the other hand, there is the health and sanity of honest thinking—and though the thought be crude, obscure or exaggerated, there is at least the possibility of lasting results. In the re-discovery and re-absorption of the intellectual heritage of classical and patristic times there was always the danger of heresy. The process of adapting knowledge, pagan in source, coming sometimes through infidel channels, was certainly perilous. It has to be remembered that it was the Church that initiated and carried through this process; that to the Church the world is indebted for the Renaissance of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But the process inevitably presented serious problems. In the first place, it yielded a copious mass of new comment and interpretation upon the original body of Christian dogma, viewed from a philosophic standpoint. Apply the logical methods of scholasticism and envisage dogma in the light of the metaphysical problem of the relations between the universal and the particular, and you have to decide whether the realist, the nominalist or the conceptualist is the true interpreter of the creeds. The difficulty was increased with the advent of Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century. One exposition of Aristotle was definitely declared to be heresy—that of the Averrhoïsts. But the Augustinian opponents of St. Thomas Aquinas endeavoured to confound him in the charge of heresy: and it was for a time doubtful whether Aristotelianism in any shape or form could be accepted as orthodox. Not only Alberto-Thomists in their attack upon the Averrhoïsts, but secular clergy warring with regulars, Franciscans inveighing against Dominicans, all glibly brought the convenient accusation of heresy against their opponents. It was for lawful authority to determine categorically what was orthodox, what heretical. But no authority was, as a matter of fact, impartial or certain to be final. Authority, whether papal, conciliar or academic, was itself wedded to one school of thought or another, swayed by the predominant philosophy of its own passing day.
It was not only a question of new ways of regarding, new interpretations of, existing dogma. There was also the problem presented by new dogmas, such as those of the Beatific Vision and the Immaculate Conception. Such tenets were not in themselves either inherently orthodox or heretical. When a creed is stabilized, completely rigid, it is easy to be exactly faithful to it; but when it is fluid, even for the most orthodox of intent, safety can only be found in caution.
But the chief potential source of trouble in the intellectual ferment of scholasticism lay in the fact that it inevitably placed side by side two different authorities, the objective authority of the Church as enshrined in Scripture, tradition, papal and other lawful ecclesiastical dicta, and, on the other hand, the subjective authority of the human reason. All discussion, all argument is necessarily an appeal largely to this second authority. While the great majority of the scholastics only used reason in order to justify revealed truth and never questioned the superiority of the infallible, the divine authority of the Church over the fallible authority of man’s intellect, there were others, such as Eriugena and Abelard, who placed reason first. Finally, there came a scholastic in Wycliffe, whose realism led him into dangerous errors, not only subversive of the cardinal doctrine of transubstantiation, but also threatening the whole status and mediatorial character of the priesthood.
It is most important to remember that the scholastic philosophers were in all cases clerics, representative of, and not antagonistic to, Catholic theology; that even the Averrhoïsts were also clerics, having no desire to break with the Church. On the other hand, the freedom of thought which the universities stood for and dialectic fostered, and which the Church not only did not repress, but even encouraged, had a tendency to produce heresy. Realism evolved pantheism; nominalism unitarianism. The intellectual influences of university life brought forth Gerson, D’Ailly and the other whole-hearted reformers who made the great effort at revival of the Church from within which failed at Constance and Basel; but it also brought forth Wycliffe and Hus, whom those Councils condemned. It was never absolutely clear where the dividing line between orthodoxy and heresy would rest. However much they might be reconciled or confused, the ideals and methods of theology and philosophy cannot be the same. The postulates of the one are not those of the other; and the more the scientific spirit is developed, the fewer the postulates of any sort that it is ready to accept. The Averrhoïsts at least saw this, only saving their position by the equivocation of the double truth.
Which was really the more dangerous to Catholic doctrine—the organized heresies, as a rule ignorant, perverted, having the seeds of their own destruction in their very rottenness, which the Church did systematically persecute; or the philosophical speculations of the universities, with their temptations to rationalism which the Church in the main tolerated?478 Each produced a force not wholly transient—a force operative in the breaking up of the mediæval system. The first was anti-sacerdotalism; the second a habit of independent thought and criticism. It is true that the anti-sacerdotalism of Luther and the secular spirit of Renaissance humanism, with its entire indifference to religion, were the decisive factors in breaking up the fabric of mediævalism, and the movements of Lutheranism and humanism were largely new creations. Yet Luther owed much to Hus, and Hus everything to Wycliffe, the scholastic, and the detached attitude of the Italian humanist was only one step in advance of that of the Latin Averrhoïst. Neither the wandering sectaries, in part suggesting, in part merely articulating, an antisacerdotal sentiment, nor the philosophers with their speculations concerning universals and the ultimate cause of being, were without influence in bringing about the collapse of the mediæval structure.
It is of no use studying the question of the attitude of the mediæval Church towards heresy unless one is prepared to use imagination enough to envisage heresy from the mediæval point of view. Men’s mental outlook is governed by the intellectual conditions of their own day. A few individuals may be, as the phrase goes, ‘in advance of their time’; but at the best they form only a small minority. To consider abstractly the rights and wrongs, the advantages and disadvantages of institutions and systems is the function of the philosopher. But the historian, while not ignoring the abstract question, has specifically the function of ascertaining what, in point of fact, people’s opinions have been and why they formed them. Much that has been written on the subject of religious toleration is of only limited validity because it simply denounces, and does not attempt to explain or to appreciate, the psychology of intolerance.479 Thus, for example, Locke’s ‘Letters on Toleration’ have little argumentative value, because they are based on a complete ignoratio elenchi. Religious toleration is a great principle, but many modern dithyrambs on the inalienable right of liberty of thought and conscience fall rather wide of the mark, can convince only the already converted. It is not very profitable to bring forward the theory of the indefeasible right of free thought in condemnation of mediæval society—to the whole of which, and by no means to its clerical elements only, the conception of such a right was entirely foreign. After all, even to-day the belief in an absolute toleration is held by only a very few, and even these anarchists will usually be found to hold it with certain reservations.480 Organized society cannot tolerate the forces which are subversive of it. It does not tolerate the criminal. ‘A universal and absolute toleration of everything and everybody would lead to a general chaos as certainly as a universal and absolute intolerance.’481 It is undoubtedly true that a certain measure of ‘intolerance is essential to all that is, or moves, or lives, for tolerance of destructive elements within the organism amounts to suicide.’482 The individual possesses rights in so far as they are not prejudicial to the welfare of his fellows and the interests of the entire community. And the recognition that the maintenance of social order was perfectly compatible with the acknowledgment of the right of individual opinion and the permission of diversity of views, this in the Middle Ages ‘was a discovery to be made, not a truth to be proved.’483
For the Middle Ages religion was not divorced from the secular life. The Respublica Christiana was an unity and a potent reality. The common faith was the panoply of the State. Devotion to it was an integral part of patriotism, and the counterpart of loyalty to the secular prince and of obedience to his laws. The man, therefore, who assailed the faith assailed society; in cutting himself off from the Church he outlawed himself from the State. Acknowledgment of the sacred truths of Christianity was the foundation of all morality. The mediæval mind could not conceive of morality apart from religion. Hence respect for the divine law, as revealed in the Scripture and the Church, was regarded as the sole guarantee for the security of ordered society. Heresy was considered as essentially anti-social, anarchic; was conceived of as analogous to false coining or treason. Only to falsify truth was more heinous than to falsify the coin and treason against God than treason against man. The exposition of the nature of heresy in Ludovico à Paramo is most logical. The character of a state depends on its religion; the faith is the foundation of the state.484 Heretics cannot dwell in harmony with Catholics: for if difference of language severs, how much more difference of belief?485 Heresy is productive of all manner of vice and immorality, which are antagonistic to order and government.486
To the Church all this was self-evident. How could she stand neutral as between truth and falsehood, and treat them as if on an equality? She found all the strong walls and bastions, defences of the theocratic city, of which she was the appointed warden, being attacked by an insidious enemy within the gates. She had the power to defend; how could she be justified if she held her hand? The heretic questioned her credentials, turned her claims to ridicule, threatened to bring down the whole structure of the Christian polity to the ground. Both in self-defence and in common loyalty to her mission she must strike. All the intensity of religious conviction inspired to persecution. Tolerance, argues de Maistre, only indicates religious indifference.487 Moreover, the mediæval churchman was inevitably much influenced by the injunctions of the Old Testament. The Church succeeded to the heritage of the synagogue.488
But it was not the Church only that was persuaded of the essentially dangerous and anti-social character of heresy. Partly, no doubt, as the result of the Church’s teaching through many generations, but certainly of their own accord and not as the result of any direct instruction, both secular rulers and the ordinary laity were equally convinced.489 They all lived in a thoroughly theocratic atmosphere. The prince sincerely saw in the heretic an enemy of all authority, and therefore of his own.490 Secular legislation was just as unequivocal in its treatment of heresy as was Canon law. To the ordinary layman the heretic appeared as a thoroughly cross-grained, cantankerous, dangerous person, certainly of some immoral propensities and perhaps sexually perverted.491
Such was the mediæval point of view; and, once granted the necessary premises, it is extremely logical and exceedingly hard to combat. Now-a-days we do not accept those premises; but in the Middle Ages we should probably not have dreamed of questioning them. On the extraordinarily interesting and important question of the causes of this change of attitude authorities do, and are likely to, differ, though many students will agree in combining their conclusions. To those who, like John Stuart Mill and Lecky for instance, attribute religious persecution almost entirely to the doctrine of exclusive salvation, the causes of the growth of tolerance will appear to be the extension of the sceptical spirit and the process of the secularization of politics.492 Others, such as Bishop Creighton (who will not agree that persecution is to be explained by the doctrine of exclusive salvation at all),493 or as Sir F. Pollock (who classifies different types of intolerance—tribal, political, social), insist strongly upon the simple factor of experience. ‘It is not the demonstration of abstract rights, but the experience of inutility, that has made governments leave off persecuting.’494 After all, the great justification of liberty of thought lies not in the attempted demonstration of a natural right, but in the records of the painful process whereby toleration has been achieved.495 It would have saved an infinity of bloodshed and misery, would have freed the palimpsest of history of some of its most terrible blots, could the principle of toleration have been established without that awful struggle. But none of the great triumphs of mankind have been achieved save after centuries of effort, loss and failure.
To the moral judgment of our own day no instrument of persecution seems more odious than the Inquisition. Protestants have persecuted just as whole-heartedly as Catholics, and with far less excuse; but the Inquisition stands by itself, as a regular specialized tribunal for persecution, immensely efficient, with an existence of centuries to its record.496 We have seen the way in which the Inquisition came into being. Both the circumstances of its origin and the intentions of its various founders gave the tribunal a character only semi-judicial. Indeed, if we object that the Inquisition was a bad court of justice, its originators could retort with truth that it was not intended to be a simple court of justice. The Inquisition was created to deal with erring children, not criminals; not merely to pronounce a verdict, but to produce reconciliation and amendment; not to punish, but to penance. The Church, through the Inquisition, was dealing in the spirit of a parent with her own children, over whom she had all a parent’s rights of discipline and chastisement, but also evincing a parent’s deep desire for something more than justice and punishment, for the ending of estrangement and the restoration of loving union in the family. Such was the pure theory of the Inquisition, a much more benignant conception than that of the ordinary law-court. In the latter, the mere fact of repentance would not avail; in the former, if it were sincere, it availed everything. So de Maistre, defending the Spanish Inquisition, declared it to be the most lenient, the most merciful tribunal in the world.
But we have to consider the point of view, not only of the judge, but of the defendant. Whatever the real nature of the tribunal, the man brought before it was on his trial. The tribunal did pronounce a verdict, and upon that verdict his reputation, perhaps his freedom or his life, depended. He wanted justice, not mercy: and the Inquisition might be lenient, but it was not fair. It was radically unfair. It gave no facilities whatever for the plea of Not Guilty. It cared nought for the reputation of the accused. He had already lost his reputation by being before the court at all. The very fact of defamation, of being ‘suspect’ inferred guilt. To leave the court of the Inquisition without a stain upon one’s character was virtually impossible. In all manner of ways the accused was at a disadvantage—in the suppression of the names of witnesses and of evidence, in the refusal of legal assistance, in the use of torture, and above all in the fact that the judge was also the prosecutor, who regarded it as perfectly legitimate to browbeat and confuse the defendant, if he was so misguided and unfilial as to endeavour to defend himself. Inquisitorial procedure was a miserable travesty of justice; and its mercifulness was forthcoming only on its own terms. To all save the meekly submissive the Inquisition typified not mercy and love, but remorselessness and cruelty.
While in studying the origins of the Inquisition we are bound to examine, and to seek to understand, the point of view of those who were responsible for its inception, in estimating its character and results we need not, nay we ought not, to judge by any other criterion than that dictated by the highest conceptions of right and justice. The common, the accepted, standard of to-day both as regards justice and humanity is, happily, greatly higher than that of the Middle Ages. Much that has been written of the Inquisition has been vitiated by an attempt to read into the mind and conduct of men of mediæval times a humanitarianism which is the peculiar product of the modern world, and which they could not even have understood. Even more vitiated would be any thesis which, not satisfied with justifying the originators of the Inquisition, sought to justify the institution itself. Certainly the motive for such an attempt could not be impartiality. Only moral obliquity can be blind to the transparent abominations of inquisitorial procedure.
If its character as a tribunal was essentially evil, evil also were some of the Inquisition’s results. Secular princes discerned its remarkable potential utility to themselves and regarded it with envy and admiration. Its methods had a satisfactory efficiency found in no other court. By such methods conviction could be practically assured. The charge of heresy could therefore be preferred against political enemies with the happiest prospects of advantage. The destruction for purely political ends was achieved by the use of inquisitorial methods of the Templars, Jeanne d’Arc, Savonarola.497
Those are the most notorious, but there are other instances of this abuse of the sacred tribunal for purely secular, and sometimes base and immoral, purposes.
Worse still—and possibly this is the worst aspect of the whole story of the Inquisition—its pernicious methods of procedure were borrowed by the admiring secular princes for their courts, which did not pretend to have the double nature which was the explanation, if not the excuse, for the Inquisition’s adoption of its system. Thus civil courts in Europe came to be tarnished by the system of inquisitio, the secret enquiry, the heaping up of disabilities for the defence, the application of torture—all these abuses having the august sanction of ecclesiastical use. The lay authority could triumphantly vindicate such innovations, whereby justice became an unequal contest between authority, combining the two characters of prosecutor and judge, and the unhappy prisoner, by pointing to the example of the Church, the repository of the sublime truths of divine justice and Christian charity. To the fortunate fact that the Inquisition never secured a footing in the British Islands is largely due their maintenance, in contradistinction to Continental states, of the open trial and of the great maxim that no one is presumed to be guilty, that the onus of proof lies with the prosecution. It was not the fault of the Church that the secular power admired and imitated the methods of the Holy Office; but it is surely a calamity that it should have been able to find in an ecclesiastical tribunal a system which must seem to every fair-minded man to-day so abhorrent to the whole spirit and tenor of the Christian gospel.
No attempt has been made in these pages to present the heresies of the Middle Ages in any heroic light, to slur over the pernicious crudities of many of them. As between the spiritual and intellectual ideals represented by the mediæval Church and those represented by the majority of the sectaries the choice is self-evident. Wycliffites and Husites stand obviously on a far higher plane, but Petrobrusians, Cathari, Dolcinists, Flagellants and many others had no fertile ideas to bequeath to a later day and were, at best perhaps, a nuisance in their own. Yet it has to be remembered that not only noble-minded men like Hus and Jerome of Prague, whose creed, whether true or not, was in any case sane and pure and exalted, but also innumerable others, whom we know only as names in inquisitorial records, who whatever the faith they professed stood constant through physical and mental anguish, to perish perhaps at the last at the stake in a world barren of pity with no friendly faces to encourage them—these suffered for a great ideal, that of fidelity to the spirit of truthfulness, of intellectual integrity. All who have died rather than be false to themselves and their vision of truth, thus demonstrating to the world their conviction that belief is worth dying for—whether Catholics or Protestants or the most erring of mediæval heretics—have done service to the cause of human progress. For, if it be true that only through the tragic experience of centuries of religious persecution could mankind attain to the establishment of the principle of liberty of thought and conscience, then every one of us to-day who enjoys the benefits of such liberty owes a debt of gratitude to the men and women who for conscience’ sake braved obloquy, torture-chamber and fire.
NOTE ON AUTHORITIES
A full bibliography of the subject of Heresy and its Repression in the Middle Ages would be exceedingly lengthy. All that is attempted here is to give a select list of a few of the most useful, important and most easily accessible works. The most thorough bibliography for the subject available is that in T. de Cauzons, Histoire de l’Inquisition en France (q.v.), the list of books covering forty pages and including 850 works. This is for the history of the tribunal in France alone.
It has to be borne in mind that by far the greater part of our contemporary evidence for the history of mediæval heresies is hostile evidence, consisting of denunciations of them by orthodox theologians, the treatises of inquisitors who condemned their adherents, notes made of evidence given by defendants. Only those heretics who were themselves philosophers or theologians—and these, such as Siger of Brabant, Wycliffe and Hus, are relatively very few—have left their own records behind them. Due allowance, therefore, has to be made in using most contemporary authorities for considerable bias.
I
Inquisitorial Treatises
These are, on the whole, the most generally valuable of contemporary sources. The two most important for the period dealt with in this book are:
Nicholas Eymeric, Directorium Inquisitorum cum commentariis F. Pegnae (Rome, 1585; also Venice, 1607).
Bernard Gui, Practica Inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis (ed. C. Douais, Paris, 1886).
Eymeric was inquisitor in Aragon in the latter half of the fourteenth century. His compendious work is probably the most authoritative of all inquisitorial treatises, being a complete exposition of the principles of the tribunal and the doctrines of the different sects with which it had to deal, and giving the minutest details of its procedure. Bernard Gui, appointed inquisitor at Toulouse in 1306, was the most vigorous and remarkable of those who helped to stamp out Catharism in Languedoc after the Albigensian crusades.
The following treatises are not contemporary, but they are valuable as expositions of the permanent principles and methods of the tribunal. They are also useful for the occasional comments made by these later experts on the work of their predecessors:
J. Simancas, De Catholicis Institutionibus.
A. Bzovius, Historiae Ecclesiasticae.
J. à Royas, De Haereticis.
Bernard of Como, Lucerna Inquisitorum haereticae pravitatis.
Arnaldo Albertini, Tractatus de agnoscendis assertionibus Catholicis et haereticis.
Zanchino Ugolini, De Haereticis.
All these, among other similar tracts, are included in Zilettus, Tractatus Universi Juris (Venice, 1633), vol. xi, pt. ii.
See also Ludovico à Paramo, De origine et progressu officii Sanctae Inquisitionis (Madrid, 1598).
Umberto Locati, Opus judiciale inquisitorum (Rome, 1572).
F. Peña, Inquirendorum haereticorum lucerna (Madrid, 1598).
Carena, Tractatus de officio Sanctae Inquisitionis (Lyons, 1669).
II
Collections of Original Documents
There are records of the proceedings and sentences pronounced in the Inquisitions in the South of France in Liber sententiarum Inquisitionis Tholosanae, 1307-13, printed as an appendix to Philippe à Limborch, Historia Inquisitionis (Amsterdam, 1692). Note that this Liber sententiarum is not included in Chandler’s English translation of Limborch. These are the sentences pronounced by Bernard Gui. The proceedings of the Inquisition of Carcassonne, notably the sentences of Bernard de Caux, are contained in Documents pour servir à l’histoire de l’Inquisition dans le Languedoc (ed. C. Douais, Paris, 1900).
There are exceedingly useful extracts from original documents of various sorts relating to mediæval heresies in the following:
J. J. Döllinger, Beiträge zur Sektensgeschichte (Munich, 1890), vol. ii.
P. Frédéricq, Corpus documentorum Inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Nederlandicae (Ghent, 1889-1906), vols., i-iii.
For the edicts of ecclesiastical Councils the best collection is:
P. Labbe, G. D. Mansi, etc., Sacrorum conciliorum nova et amplissima collectio (Paris, 1901-13), esp. vol. xxii, 1166-1225; vol. xxiii, 1225-1268; vol. xxiv, 1269-1299; vol. xxv, 1300-1344; vol. xxvi, 1344-1409.
For papal bulls between 1198 and 1304 see A. Potthast, Regesta Pontificum Romanorum (Berlin, 1874 et seq.).
Important documents relating to the Dominican order are in Ripoll et Brémond, Bullarium ordinis S. Dominici (8 vols., Rome, 1737 et seq.).
The Constitutions of the Emperor Frederick II are in J. L. A. Huillard-Bréholles, Historia diplomatica Friderici Secundi (Paris, 1852-61).
III
Histories of the Inquisition
There are two useful histories of comparatively early date:
J. Marsollier, Histoire de l’Inquisition (Cologne, 1693).
P. à Limborch, Historia Inquisitionis (Amsterdam, 1692). The English version is History of the Inquisition (tr. S. Chandler, London, 1731). The latter is used in this book except when the Liber sententiarum, only printed in the original, is referred to. Limborch’s, although avowedly a propaganda work, is still of value, because it was based on the treatises of inquisitors, making particularly full use of Eymeric, and it is easy to make proper allowance for the avowed bias.
In 1817 appeared the first version (a French translation) of the great work on the Spanish Inquisition by J. A. Llorente under the title, Histoire critique de l’Inquisition d’Espagne. The original Spanish text was not published till 1822. Only the introduction and first four chapters are relevant to the mediæval Inquisition.
English writers have been mainly interested in the Spanish Inquisition, as founded by Ferdinand and Isabella, and in the Inquisition in Portugal. English seamen and traders suffered at their hands, either in the Peninsula or its dependencies, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See, for example, English Merchants and the Spanish Inquisition in the Canaries (Royal Historical Society, ed. L. de Alberti, A. B. Wallis Chapman, 1912); R. Dugdale’s A Narrative of popish cruelties; or a new account of the Spanish Inquisition (1680) in Harleian Miscellany, vol. vii, p. 105; J. Stevens, The Ancient and Present State of Portugal ... containing ... A curious Account of the Inquisition (London, 1705). Later English writers show a similar strongly Protestant bias, e.g. F. B. Wright, A History of Religious Persecution from the Apostolic to the Present Time; and of the Inquisitions of Spain, Portugal and Goa (1816); W. H. Rule, History of the Inquisition (London, 1868). Only the first nine chapters of the last-named book are concerned with the Middle Ages.
All previous works were superseded by the monumental labours of the American historian, H. C. Lea, in his
Superstition and Force (Philadelphia, 1866; 4th ed., 1892).
A History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (New York, 1887).
A History of the Inquisition of Spain (New York, 1906-7).
The Inquisition in the Spanish Dependencies (New York, 1908).
Chapters in the Religious History of Spain connected with the Inquisition (Philadelphia, 1893).
Together, these volumes represent an immense fund of learning and the most painstaking research. For this reason it will be long indeed before they are superseded. They have been adversely criticized, as being marred by strong anti-Catholic prejudice. Colour is undoubtedly lent to the charge by the rather unfortunate fact that the History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages opens with an account of the abuses of the mediæval Church and that the whole argument of the book appears as though largely based upon these initial contentions. Lea is also inclined to be biased in favour of all heretics as against their persecutors. But while in detail he may be open to criticism and his attitude is quite clearly Protestant, the great bulk of his work remains unshaken. The Romanist point of view with regard to it should, however, be studied. It is summarized, for example, in P. M. Baumgarten, H. C. Lea’s Historical Writings: a critical inquiry (New York, 1909), and will be found incidentally in the works of recent Catholic historians of the Inquisition (q.v. infra). There are admirable critiques of Lea’s work in:
Lord Acton’s The History of Freedom of Thought and other Essays (London, 1909);
P. Frédéricq’s Introduction to the French translation of Lea’s History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages (tr. S. Reinach, Paris, 1900, pp. i-xxviii);