The persecution of perceived heretics has long been a staple topic for late medievalists, but until recently anglophone historiography had barely begun to cover this phenomenon in the German-speaking regions of Europe. Eugene Smelyansky's monograph, developed from his doctoral dissertation and focusing on a series of cases involving Waldensians between 1390 and 1404, is therefore a welcome intervention. It approaches its subject from the perspective of the social and political dynamics within German cities, effectively cross-pollinating two fields and historiographies: ecclesiastical history and heresy studies, on the one hand, and urban history and Städteforschung, on the other.
Smelyansky's central contention is that late medieval German cities pursued a vision of deliberate Christian self-government at the communal level, characterized by a discourse and ideology of the common good as a body of honorable citizens, jealous defense of municipal jurisdiction against external encroachment (especially by bishops, from whose overlordship many urban councils had extricated themselves), and increasingly strict internal disciplining of inhabitants’ behaviors. The presence of heretics inside a city threatened this vision by exposing it to outside interference and harming its honorable reputation. Cities therefore persecuted heretics but tended to do so on their own terms rather than through prescribed ecclesiastical institutions.
After a short introduction that defines the thematic and chronological parameters of the book and locates it within the sparse historiography of the persecution of late medieval German Waldensians, the first two chapters of the book flesh out the context for the persecutions of the 1390s. In chapter 1 Smelyansky addresses the many long-term political, social, cultural, and economic trends that shaped late medieval German communes, such that they “began to develop a new city-centric world-view that emphasized the city's autonomy in matters secular and religious” (16). This chapter builds the case that municipal governments increasingly conceived of themselves as having responsibility for religious affairs within their city walls, and that their commonplace notions of honor and the common good were spiritually freighted.
Here Smelyansky looks forward rather than backward, drawing fruitfully on well-known scholars of the urban Reformations such as Bernd Moeller, who famously depicted the idealized German city as a “pure and godly ‘miniature corpus christianum’” (30). This crucial chapter forms a convincing springboard for what follows, though it could have drawn a little more on the extensive specialized German-language scholarship of the phenomena it analyzes, such as Andreas Deutsch's work on notions of honor. Chapter 2 then sets the scene for the heresy persecutions that took place in these cities, providing a longer history of Waldensianism and surveying the careers of the three key anti-Waldensian inquisitors in the book's timeframe: Martin of Amberg, Peter Zwicker, and Heinrich Angermeier.
The book hits its stride in the remaining chapters (4 through 6), which constitute a series of case studies of how attempted or actual persecutions of alleged heretics played out in a selection of south German and Swiss cities. Each case is meticulously researched, drawing on an impressively multilingual bibliography and a mixture of edited and archival primary sources. In Augsburg the city council reacted to the discovery of a community of Waldensians by imposing a penance it devised, short-circuiting the spiritual jurisdiction of the much-resented bishop of Augsburg within the city, and it executed some accused heretics who sought to strike a deal with the bishop. In Rothenburg ob der Tauber the accusation of heresy was instrumentalized by the mayor to oust an up-and-coming rival. The Strasbourg authorities treated heresy as a slight to communal honor and thus banished some Waldensians discovered in their city in 1400 rather than following canonical procedure. The embarrassment of uncovering many influential Waldensians in Bern in 1399 prompted that city's council to embark on a campaign of internal and external reputation management through chronicles, ordinances, and ceremonies. This included warning neighboring cities about the presence of Waldensians, but in nearby Fribourg the council engineered the acquittal of its citizens on all charges of heresy, protecting its reputation.
Smelyansky's case-by-case approach amply bears out his argument that a “city-centric world-view” prompted municipal authorities to intervene in the persecution of heretics, while highlighting the specificities of each episode in granular detail, thereby moving beyond the existing historiography of this topic. His findings will be of interest to scholars of late medieval heresy, urban history, and Central European history.
