Description
Book SynopsisBurning Bodies interrogates the ideas that the authors of historical and theological texts in the medieval West associated with the burning alive of Christian heretics. Michael Barbezat traces these instances from the eleventh century until the advent of the internal crusades of the thirteenth century, depicting the exclusionary fires of hell and judicial execution, the purifying fire of post-mortem purgation, and the unifying fire of God''s love that medieval authors used to describe processes of social inclusion and exclusion.
Burning Bodies analyses how the accounts of burning heretics alive referenced, affirmed, and elaborated upon wider discourses of community and eschatology. Descriptions of burning supposed heretics alive were profoundly related to ideas of a redemptive Christian community based upon a divine, unifying love, and medieval understandings of what these burnings could have meant to contemporaries cannot be fully appreciated outside of this dis
Trade Review
Barbezat's writing is elegant, with many admirable turns of phrase. He has covered vast territory, excavating earlier intellectual and theological foundations for a punitive violence that began at a discrete moment... It is an intellectual history, although the (largely familiar) texts often depict actual events, and Barbezat's interpretation of them is imaginative... While his book illuminates an important component within the history of medieval heresiology, it also warns us all against the enduring tendency of communities to pursue purity and to show love by excluding their heretics.
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Table of ContentsList of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Burning Bodies and Medieval Human Communal Identity
1. Our God Is Like a Consuming Fire: Burning Bodies and Christian Community
2. Fields and Bodies: Toleration and Threat in a Shared Space
3. The Beginning at Orleans in 1022: Heretics and Hellfire
4. Likeness in Difference: Three Burnings in the Twelfth-Century Rhineland
5. Like Rejoices in Like: Recognition and Differentiation in Descriptions of Heresy
6. Witches and Orgiastic Rituals: Heresy, Sex, and Reading in the Late Twelfth and Early Thirteenth Centuries
7. Leaping from the Flames: Love, Redemption, and Holy War in the Albigensian Crusade
Conclusion: The Uses of Exclusion and Fear for a Community of Love
Notes
Works Cited
Index
