As we have seen, when people admitted their guilt, Conrad of Marburg and his associates had their heads shaved. Another source makes clear the purpose: having confessed, this was 'a sign of penance' forced upon the recipient.692 Guilt, confession and penance focus upon the individual, and are part of a wider penitential system amplified by the papacy in the thirteenth century. At annual confession (as enjoined by Lateran IV) a lay person's confessor would assign to them a suitable penance, tailored to the sin and to the sinner's ability to perform it. The usual penances were repetitions of the Paternoster and Ave Maria prayers, making fasts, giving alms and going on pilgrimage. Such practices were usually described as 'private' penances, not meaning that they were secret, but that their effects were directed inward, to the individual alone. The kind of penance imposed by Conrad, however, was of a different order: visibly public and an attempt to inculcate public shame as much as private contrition. This form of penance became a key feature in the use of inquisition against heresy, though not quite in the brutal form deployed in Mainz. Inquisitors were able to impose various penances upon those they found guilty, including long periods of imprisonment, pilgrimage to distant shrines (the pilgrim had to bring back letters proving that he or she had indeed travelled there), and hefty fines and the confiscation of property. The most common penance, however, was the imposition of crosses: two yellow ones, stitched front and back to the person's clothing, to be worn at all times for a set period - a year, two years, a decade, for life. Inquisitors are famous for having people burnt to death, and in one sense rightly so: those who 'relapsed' into heresy, or who 'obstinately' persisted in their heresy, were sent to the stake, as the church 'relinquished' the care of their soul (and set out a stark warning to others). But the death sentence was, after the Albigensian Crusade and the fall of the last Cathar castles in the 1240s, a relatively rare occurrence. The sentences handed down by Bernard Gui survive for us today: from over 600 judgments, forty-one people were sent to the stake. Many more - either immediately, or after a period of imprisonment - were to wear the yellow
Crosses.
Burning people to death is clearly a form of repression. It silences them most effectively, and terrorises their immediate supporters. But marking people out with crosses is a rather different kind of act. Not 'kinder' - that is not what is at issue - but more complex, and more clearly directed outward to the society at large, as a sign to be read. Throughout the later Middle Ages, papal inquisitors handed out such sentences, and in England, too, bishops prosecuting Lollardy had those they convicted parade to church and market, sometimes carrying bundles of faggots or other penitential signs to indicate their guilt. Making transgressive bodies publicly legible is also a feature elsewhere: Jews were to wear distinguishing badges on their clothing, lepers had to carry a bell announcing their presence, and by the fourteenth century prostitutes were frequently ordered to dress in particular kinds of clothing such as striped hoods to mark them out. Such signs can be seen as a way of making visible 'outsiders' and thus dividing them from social embrace. But punishments of this kind had a further application which complicates the neat anthropological division of 'in-group' and 'out-group'. Across Europe, church
18 Given, Inquisition and Medieval Society, 69, table 3.1.
Courts regularly sentenced people to public penances, most often for sexual sins such as fornication or adultery. Usually the guilty men and women would be beaten around the marketplace and the church, sometimes wearing only shifts and carrying a white stick or candle. Such spectacles would have been common within the medieval parish. Hence the marking out of heretics, Jews, prostitutes and lepers, and the harsher public penances enacted upon those guilty of heresy or other crimes, form part of a continuum with other regulatory aspects of communal life.
What this points to firstly is that, whilst the church's cultural weapons against heresy and other transgressions might only have gained active support on particular occasions, there was a much wider, more quiescent acceptance of the world-picture of transgressive sin, communal exclusion and hierarchical policing upon which they rested. Repression in this sense was largely the norm, and extended well beyond the dramatic matters of burning heretics or executing sodomites. Moreover, it has been pointed out that the development of the legal process of inquisitio was initially directed towards policing sexual sin (firstly among the clergy, but then more broadly). The twelfth century had seen the concept of sin becoming more aligned with that of crime, thus justifying the use of coercion in its treatment. Lateran IV's introduction of inquisitio allowed clerics to operate ex officio and search out crimes - such as sexual immorality within the parish - in the absence of any particular accuser. As Richard Fraher puts it, these developments see the formation of a prosecuting society as much as a persecuting one.693 The church itself did not do all the prosecuting: major sexual offences, including sodomy, were frequently punished by secular authorities in Germany and northern Italy. But such matters were nonetheless strongly influenced by clerical concepts and rhetoric.
The developments over the period 1150-1350 - the consolidation of Moore's 'Persecuting Society' - did not concern only heresy, nor even the broader repression of 'outsiders'. An important background context was the slow crescendo of papal claims to authority, reaching pre-eminence under Innocent III, and the accompanying shifts in relationship between church and secular power in each European kingdom. The literate elite were part and parcel of these developments, their claim to intellectual and cultural authority underpinning the changes they sought. But two key elements lay at the heart of the shift described here, and they may prompt us to consider how power is not simply repressive, silencing speech and eradicating action, but also productive - inculcating new ways of thinking, seeing, talking and behaving. The first element was a change in juridical procedure, epitomised in Innocent III's development of inquisitio. Inquisition, whether into heresy or clerical concubinage or lay sexual transgressions or witchcraft, provided the church with a far more hierarchical mechanism of legislative governance than the preceding procedures of accusatio and denunciatio or the trial by ordeal. The ability to act ex officio without local community support, the active use of bureaucratic documentation, and the increasingly cunning techniques for extracting confession made inquisition into a powerful but also delicate tool. It tackled those it governed as individuals, rather than collectivities, and inserted them into the textual machinery of governance. And here it is linked to the second element: the changed scope of the cura animarum. The church's interest in the spiritual lives of the laity grew over the course of the twelfth century, and entered canonical legislation particularly in the thirteenth. The universal requirement for annual confession, the provision of good parochial ministering, the expansion of preaching directed towards reforming a lay audience, all indicate a change in how the ecclesiastical elite viewed their flock. Reports of heresy in the eleventh and early twelfth century had tended to present the laity as a rather passive, easily swayed 'lump' corrupted by the small 'leaven' of the heresiarch. The use of inquisition, however, met that 'lump' in its individual components, interrogated them and found that the laity were more varied and complex in their transgressive behaviour than previously thought. This was the sharp end of a wider shift in the attempt to bring greater, more detailed and more individually tailored spiritual discipline to the people. Lay conduct - economic, sexual, spiritual - was to be policed as never before. At certain times of repression - in thirteenth-century Languedoc and in early fifteenth-century England for example - the church attempted to limit not only the activities of heretical proselytisers, but to proscribe lay discussion of the Christian faith or the dissemination of vernacular religious literature. Behaviour that might at one point have been thought simple laxity or a minor transgression could, in the later Middle Ages, take on a more sinister hue. Blaspheming, for instance, was long decried by ecclesiastical authors, but by the fifteenth century it had in some places become not merely a bad habit for which one's parishioners should be chided, but a matter of criminal legislation and even inquisitorial prosecution. The scope of how one could transgress had changed.
Thus the development of repression did not only silence and oppress. Over the high and later Middle Ages, it also helped to produce a new sense of what a
Lay person was and should be. The persecution of different 'outsiders' brought with it further productive effects, forging and mapping orthodoxy in different ways for different times and places. One chronicler, recounting more approvingly Conrad of Marburg's activities, lists the 'errors' of those he persecuted. Some are stereotypes of heretical behaviour - kissing the devil 'in the worst possible way' (probably on the anus). But others are more interestingly mundane: people who disparaged ecclesiastical authority, people who ignored clerical rules against consanguinity, people who worked on Feast Days and ate meat on Good Friday.694 Such sins were surely not limited to members of any identifiable heretical 'sect', but were rather endemic faults within the laity. The chronicler's report on such 'crimes' was part of a wider attempt at reforming secular life, depicting what might be seen as laxity or doubt as a major transgression against the faith. A similar process was at work in other fields: anti-semitic tales of Host-desecration were used to bolster belief in, and emphasise the importance of, the miracle oftransubstantiation. The grotesque display of leprosy provided a chastening example of how (sexual) sin wrote upon the body, thus encouraging people to confession and penance. Persecuting Waldensians stressed the clerical ownership ofpreaching, chasing so-called Free Spirits mapped the right and wrong ways of attempting mysti-cial communion, prosecuting Lollards bolstered the sacraments and the cult of saints (and provided the Lancastrian regime with a helpful bogeyman against which it could shore up its own legitimacy). The witch trials of the fifteenth century - which were nothing like on the scale of early-modern witch-crazes, albeit more common than in the preceding centuries - were fuelled by a belief in diabolism on the part of the prosecuting authorities rather than the general populace. For authors of witch-prosecuting manuals such as Heinrich Institoris or Johannes Nider, belief in demons bolstered belief in God and belief in the necessity of ecclesiastical authority to lead moral reform in this unsettled period. The diabolical excesses of witches were a great way to counter doubt and anticlericalism.695
Europe did become a persecuting society, but persecution was mostly limited to particular times and places, often when linked to other political disputes. The medieval church and secular rulers never possessed the kind of state apparatus that sustained a modern persecuting society such as Stalinist Russia, the German Democratic Republic in the later twentieth century or
North Korea at the current time of writing. Nor was the link between religious identity and national governance ever as close as that produced by the bloody upheavals of the Reformation and counter-Reformation. Although the great convulsions of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries did produce more abstract discussion of toleration, in practical terms there was a greater willingness and opportunity to repress religious difference after the Reformation than before it. Nor was medieval Europe solely a persecuting society: the machinery of repression was always one part of a larger mechanism for producing and refining orthodox identities. At the same time, however, in the lurid stories it told to encourage fear of 'outsiders', in the conflation of sodomy with heresy and witchcraft with diabolism, and in the development of inquisitorial procedures, it laid the groundwork for the darkness of later ages.
World History
