In the proposal defining this colloquium's objective and framework, Monsieur Le Goff posed the following questions: ‘Is heresy a matter for simple people or for the learned? Were there popular heresies and learned heresies? Did they play the same roles in the process of spiritual awareness? How did learned theorising and popular belief relate to the development of that heresy?’

Without a doubt, there were learned heresies throughout the Middle Ages – that is to say, dogmatic, theoretical and intellectual heresies that were the work of theologians or philosophers such as Abelard, Gilbert de la Porée, the Latin Averroists of the thirteenth century and many others. After being accused of divergence from Church orthodoxy, they were condemned as heretics. In view of such learned heretics, one cannot generally assert (as did Monsieur Le Goff) that ‘there is no such thing as an isolated heretic’. To be sure, learned heretics could have followers who were not disciples in heresy, and thus could teach without a heretical sect necessarily being formed. And since the Church sought at all costs to isolate learned heretics, the inverse could also take place; in other words, learned heretics belonged to a social group composed not of fellow heretics, but rather of fellow learned persons. They vied with each other for intellectual standing (‘more wise than it behoveth to be wise’, as St Paul said in Romans 12. 3), without consciously opposing either the faith of the Church or Catholic dogma.

Yet at times learned heretics were indeed at the origin of a popular heresy or of a heretical sect. For example, John Wyclif was certainly a very learned theologian, a master of Oxford University, who only became a heretic after a long life as a professor and without ever wishing to create a heretical sect. Wyclif had almost no learned disciples in England, and it was only after his death that the Lollards became sectaries. On the other hand, despite his posthumous condemnation, his doctrines became popular in Bohemia through professors at the University of Prague. Likewise, Jan Hus died on the pyre at Constance in 1415 without having founded a heretical sect; the group that derived from his doctrines and bore his name did not form until several years after Hus's death. What is certain is that neither Wyclif nor Hus were members of any heretical community, belonging instead to their clerical university group.

To Morgan Walter Jones

Truro. September 23, 1799

Dear Jones,

Be so good as to tell my bedmaker that I shall be in Cambridge about the latter end of next week. This is the object of my letter, but I may as well fill up the rest of the paper by writing down all the nonsense I can think upon. I make no doubt but that you have made such advances in the mathematical way, that you will have no more occasion to read before you take your degree whereas I, poor forlorn youth, have long since given up the idea of being classed at all next examination. This is my case. I very foolishly deferred beginning study [damaged – until?] the latter part of the vacation, consoling myself in my idleness, and idleness will always find some excuse; that perhaps I should remember. Some time ago, I sent off the few books I brought down to Cambridge by the waggon and the Newton by accident was put in; before I discovered it, it was too late. Can you withhold your pity from such an unfortunate wight? You are of course no longer to consider me as a reading man.

Have you heard from Cotterill lately? I promised faithfully to write to him but I never have. Tho I shall see you so soon, yet I must beg the favor of your answering me immediately and let me know who are in college. You may as well too say something about Ms T5 – tho I have seen thousands better than she, yet I have still some small curiosity respecting her. Remember your usual punctuality in correspondence. When you receive a letter from Cotterill or Cook, you answer it on the spot, double up your letter, put it in the superb breeches pocket and away with it to post-office. Be sure to treat me in the same manner.

My time had been so taken up with the nice girls that I now never think of Cambridge without silent horror. Indeed I dread to begin to read again, as the intense fag necessary to restore me is indeed truly terrific in the prospect. By this time I should think, the players must be with you. I did mean at first to be there in time, but home has many more attractions.

I'll begin by recounting what was for me a quite poignant moment. It occurred during one of the meetings the pastor of our church was directing on the Bible and how to read it. He approached the topic with an advanced knowledge of biblical languages and history, having taught at the seminary level. During this session his attention was focused on some intriguing textual configurations in passages from Isaiah. His interests were analytic and technical. When it came time toward the end of the session for feedback, a woman raised her hand and expressed uncertainty about her question's relevance to the pastor's presentation. Assured by him that any concern she had would be relevant, she asked, “Does this mean that the Bible is really only a collection of stories and other things that ancient people shared around their campfires?” Rather than address her question, he affirmed that the kind of thing he had been talking about greatly increased his regard for biblical texts. He seemed not to understand that the questioner's point was not about the intriguing intricacies of biblical texts but about the religious standing and role of biblical texts for her, about their relevance to her own needs and concerns.

The question was poignant because of what seemed the sense of loss, even grief, carried by its tone. The sense of her world bereft of something central to it was almost palpable. It reminded me of Mary's lament on finding that the body of Jesus had been taken away. While her question was off the mark, since one would not associate Isaiah texts with campfires as one might the stories in Judges, she revealed her sense of disconnection between what she expected and even needed and what the pastor had presented.

The exchange revealed a situation that, while familiar to me, had not until then been so painfully clear, namely, a disconnection between two good and earnest people and their contrary, though legitimate, interests. On the one side was contemporary biblical scholarship and on the other the need of people for the Bible to have a distinctive standing and role in and for their lives.

It is hoped that the previous chapter replaces an understanding of texts and textuality as referring only to printed products with an understanding that we are, as individuals and as groups, located on a vast terrain of discourses and other linguistic uses that actually or potentially are textual, a terrain that, along with what is not or not yet textual, provides the world or worlds in which we find ourselves. While textuality surrounds us, it does not enclose us. We can have encounters with actualities for which our texts do not prepare us. In addition, particularly when we are expected to do so by reason of our profession, we can attempt as much as possible to distinguish the textuality that we bring to encounters from the encounters themselves. People also have encounters that so outstrip or are so counter to their texts that they are unable ever to be reconciled with them, as, for example, the unexpected and untimely loss of a loved one. For the most part, though, we have a world and have our identities first of all textually, and our encounters are related to and affected by our textual identities and our locations in the textual situation.

In addition to our habit of taking texts to be objects, we also tend to view them as particulars, as discrete and self-contained. We are so accustomed to see, especially in libraries, row upon row of books and other printed materials as individual items. Indeed, we can and usually do treat texts as individual items. In addition, we expect particular texts to have demarcations, to be internally consistent, to have some kind of beginning and ending, and to differ from other texts even when sharing a topic with them. For many reasons we are justified in treating texts singularly. But we also are aware that texts are not isolated. When we pick out a book on country living, we expect it to have relations to other treatments of the topic. The interdependence of texts on one another, this intertextuality, is not a sign of inadequacy, as though we expect each text to be independent of others.

In the previous chapter I tried to establish two things. The first and more obvious one is that the gap between religious and secular realms, which became increasingly apparent as modernity progressed, stands before us now largely devoid of bridges relating the two sides to one another. Assumptions that such connections are obviously beneficial and should be retained have ceased to mark not only academic but also the wider culture. In contrast to the preceding culture, the secular side became the shared or common realm, and the religious side became personal, optional, and separate. Some sociologists of religion argue that the depiction of contemporary societies as secular is overstated because large portions of the population, especially in the Americas, self-identify as religious. If so, their lives and identities are divided between two unrelated realms. People who treat the two realms as equally important will have difficulty relating the one side to the other. Consequently, many people respond to this situation by treating one of the realms as more important than the other. Those who identify more with the religious side will view the secular side as at best necessary and useful but, as to value and significance, relatively empty. Those who identify primarily with the secular side will, at best, treat religion as an inherited or traditional realm offering some people, and themselves occasionally, personal or group alternatives to the shared situation. People who identify fully with only one side will tend to view those on the other as not only different but also as faulty or foreign.

The principal character of late modern culture is this sharp and deep divide, and this raises the question of the viability of such a culture. A divided or conflicted culture counters one of the principal roles of a culture, namely, to provide differing people with the basis for a common or shared life. While the secular or practical realm has assumed this role, it has grown increasingly detached from traditional or religious sources of value. This raises a second question about the viability of late modernity as a culture because a major role of a culture is not only to grant people a shared life but also to grant differing people shared values, norms, and goals.

On New Year's Day 1811, the Rev. Henry Martyn, pale and still showing worrying indications of tubercular illness, ascended the pulpit of the Mission Church of Calcutta and preached a sermon entitled ‘The claims of Christian India, or an appeal in behalf of eight hundred thousand native Christians in India.’ The sermon was designed primarily to be printed and distributed as a fundraising appeal to launch the Calcutta auxiliary chapter of the British and Foreign Bible Society (BFBS). Martyn observed shortly afterwards that ‘None of the great were present; none of the clergy, though public notice was given.’ Nevertheless, donations began to arrive within hours and Anglicans and Baptists moved quickly to form the Calcutta Auxiliary.

Martyn had arrived at Aldeen, the home of David and Mary Brown, two months earlier, travelling from his station at Cawnpore. His health failing, Martyn had applied for medical leave from his chaplaincy posting in hopes that a sea voyage might both restore his failing health and provide him the opportunity to seek out expert opinion in Arabia and Persia regarding his ongoing Arabic and Persian Bible translations. Two weeks later, without final goodbyes and after only five years as an East India Company (EIC) chaplain in India, Martyn boarded the Ahmoody, bound for Bombay, accompanied by Mountstuart Elphinstone, recent Ambassador at Kabul and now appointed Resident at Poona. It was the first leg of a journey that would take him to Muscat and eventually to Persia, where he spent most of the final year and a half of his life. From there, having completed a translation of the New Testament and Psalms in Persian, he launched a final precipitous effort to return to Britain to recover his health. Martyn was overcome en route by fever in what is today Tokat, Turkey, on 16 October 1812. He was thirty-one. Fame followed. He had left behind him not only his Persian New Testament translation, but his translation of the New Testament in Hindoostanee, the language we today know as Urdu. He had made further strides on the Hindoostanee Old Testament and had overseen significant work on an Arabic translation of the New Testament. Despite such a record as a translator, however, Martyn's growing fame amongst Christians in Britain and America would rest upon a different foundation.

The following bibliography is drawn mainly from two lists: (i) the first section of Hilda Lietzmann's ‘Bibliografie Herbert Grundmann’ and (ii) the list of Grundmann's works in the ‘Literature Database for the Middle Ages’ of the Regesta Imperii. It lists published works and articles, together with a selection of encyclopaedia articles and Grundmann's Monumenta reports. The reader should go to Lietzmann's bibliography for its selection of reviews and its fuller lists of Grundmann's short notes, commemorative pieces, Monumenta reports and encyclopaedia articles.

The numbers as well as the contents of Lietzmann's bibliography – 1–95, covering 1926–71 – are followed below. Nos. 60a and 95a denote her afterthought additions. But within the range 1–95 the other numbers followed by letters are our additions, as are also nos. 96–107.

References to Grundmann's works in this volume's Introduction and its translation of Arno Borst's memorial of Grundmann use these bibliography numbers.

1. Studien uber Joachim von Floris, Beiträge zur Kulturgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance 32 (Leipzig and Berlin, 1927 (Ph.D. dissertation, Leipzig 1926); improved reprint no. 93 below; Italian translation, no. 103.

2. ‘Der Typus des Ketzers in mittelalterlicher Anschauung’, Kultur- und Universalgeschichte. Walter Goetz zu seinem 60. Geburtstage (Leipzig and Berlin, 1927), pp. 91–107; reprinted in no. 98; English translation in this volume, chapter 1.

3. ‘Mystik und Aufklärung im Mittelalter’, Zeitschrift fur deutsche Bildung 4 (1928), 449–55; reprinted in no. 98.

4. ‘Über den Apokalypsen-Kommentar des Minoriten Alexander’, Zentralblatt fur Bibliothekswesen 45 (1928), 713–23; reprinted in no. 99.

5. ‘Die Papstprophetien des Mittelalters’, AKG 19 (1929), 77–138; reprinted in no. 99.

6. ‘Kleine Beiträge über Joachim von Fiore’, ZKG n.s. 11, 48 (1929), 137–65; reprinted in no. 99.

7. ‘Liber de Flore: eine Schrift der Franziskaner-Spiritualen aus dem Anfang des 14. Jahhunderts’, Historisches Jahrbuch 49 (1929), 33–91; reprinted in no. 99.

8. Alexander von Roes, De translatione imperii und Jordanus von Osnabrück, De prerogative Romani imperii, ed. Herbert Grundmann, Quellen zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters und der Renaissance 2 (Leipzig and Berlin 1930).

9. ‘Zur Geschichte der Beginen im 13. Jahrhundert’, AKG 21 (1931), 296–320; reprinted in no. 98.

10. ‘Dante und Joachim von Fiore. Zu Paradiso X–XII’, Deutsches Dante- Jahrbuch n.s. 5, 14 (1932), 210–56; reprinted in nos. 16 and 99.

Inquisitors’ Questions (Interrogatoria)

The first papal inquisitor in northern France during the 1240s was the Dominican Robert le Petit. Known as le Bougre, he earned a villainous reputation for having forced many innocent people into compromising confessions in order to convict them of heresy and condemn them to death by fire. As complaints mounted, he was recalled by Pope Gregory IX and actually imprisoned by his religious order. The chronicler of the Senones cloister in the Vosges in the bishopric of Toul, the Benedictine Richer, recounted a particularly astonishing story. Robert was very learned and eloquent, second to none in Paris, but – it was said – thought about and desired fame excessively. Using diabolical means, he prepared a document (cartula) that he only had to place upon one's head to cause that person helplessly to declare everything the inquisitor wanted to hear. One day, during his sermon, he saw a beautiful woman, and he asked her to come to him after the sermon. Expecting that he wanted to hear her confession, she went to him alone; but he pressed her with flattery and threatened that if she would not yield to his desire, he would convict her of heresy and have her burned. But she remained determined. The next day he displayed her to the public, laying his hand on her head and asking her whether she belonged to the heretical sect. She agreed and rejected his second question, which was whether she wished to return to the Catholic faith, declaring she would rather die than renounce the sect. And so Robert could say, ‘You have heard how this woman confesses to her shame’, and arrested her.

All marvelled at this, for they had never heard the like from her. Her son, however, a gifted young cleric, asked everywhere how to save his mother from a heretic's death. A sympathetic friend, who knew the Dominican well, advised: ‘When your mother is publicly heard again tomorrow, step up next to her, and when Master Robert lays his hand on her head, grab his hand – you are certainly stronger than he is – and take away the cartula you find under the hand; hold onto it and ask Master Robert to ask his mother again about her faith.’

In 1928, the young Dr Grundmann invoked Joseph Bernhart's warning against any man ‘who steps out into the deep night with a weak flame, barely illuminating his own face’. In 1950, the mature Professor criticised the German attitude ‘Everyone walks through the darkness of history with his own light, and he feels enlightened in his blindness’. And in his old age the President of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica elaborated on Goethe’s phrase ‘Where it is going, who knows? He can hardly recall where he came from’, saying in 1967: ‘We historians attempt to recall this and to grasp how it came about; we do this by projecting into the future, always with the wish that it will lead to the good life.’ Where his own thought and action originated, and where it was headed, Herbert Grundmann was reluctant to say; when he did so it was tailored to a certain audience. But now that this life that clarified so much has been fulfilled, one may try to illuminate the face of the man who lived it. The motivation should be neither private curiosity nor professional reverence; a life so frankly consistent across forty years as these three citations indicate could teach us how we might live with history today – and that we must know.

Grundmann never hid where he came from but, rather, mocked himself with the remark that he shared his speech patterns with Otto the Great, ore iucundo saxonizans (‘with a mouth fit for Saxon’). Among his ancestors who worked as small-scale peasants and artisans in eastern Saxony, he particularly loved a teacher who – a bit of a black sheep in his family – emigrated to America. As determined as he was to move beyond his predecessors’ horizons, however, he retained their values: thrifty and industrious management, respect for solid craftsmanship, and quiet self-confidence based on accomplishment. His father rose from trading in yarn to become the joint owner of a stocking factory, and wished that his only son would eventually take over and expand the firm. But the young Grundmann resisted commercial gain in the absence of artisanal merit; even in his childhood he subscribed to Jesus’ motto of voluntary poverty (Matthew 19. 21) which Valdes and Francis had encountered in a similar setting.