Fresh investigations into heresy after 1300, demonstrating its continuing importance and influence. From the Gregorian reforms to the Protestant Reformation, heresies and heretics helped shape the religious, political, and institutional structures of medieval Europe. Within this larger history of religious ferment, the late medieval period presents a particularly dynamic array of heterodox movements, dissident modes of thought, and ecclesiastical responses. Yet recent debates about the nature of heresy in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries have too easily created an impression of the period after 1300 as merely an epilogue to the high medieval story. This volume takes the history of heresy in late medieval Europe (1300-1500) on its own terms. From Paris to Prague and fromnorthern Germany to Italy and even extending as far as Ethiopia, the essays shed new light on a vibrant world of audacious beguines, ardent Joachites, Spiritual Franciscans, innovative mystics, lay prophets, idiosyncratic alchemists, daring magicians, and even rebellious princes locked in battles with the papacy. As befits a collection honoring the pioneering career of Robert E. Lerner, the studies collected here combine close readings of manuscripts andother sources with a grounding in their political, religious and intellectual contexts, to offer fresh insights into heresies and heretics in late medieval Europe. MICHAEL D. BAILEY is Professor of History at Iowa State University; SEAN L. FIELD is Professor of History at the University of Vermont. Contributors: Louisa A. Burnham, Elizabeth Casteen, Joerg Feuchter, Samantha Kelly, Richard Kieckhefer, Deeana Copeland Klepper, FrancesKneupper, Georg Modestin, Barbara Newman, Sylvain Piron, Justine L. Trombley.

Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany explores how local religious culture was constructed in medieval European Christian society through close study of a set of neglected, late fourteenth-century manuscripts. The Mirror of Priests is a pastoral work written by Albert, an Augustinian canon from the Bavarian market town of Diessen, to guide local priests in their work with parishioners. Multiple versions of the text in Albert's own hand survive and, by comparing them, Deeana Copeland Klepper shows how ostensibly universal religious ideals and laws were adapted, interpreted, and repurposed by those given responsibility to implement them, thereby crafting distinctive, local expressions of Christianity. The vision of Christian community that emerges from Albert's pastoral guide is one in which the messiness of ordinary life is evident. Albert's imagined parish was marked out by geographic and legal boundaries-property and jurisdictional rights, tithes, and sacramental responsibility-as well as symbolic realities. By situating the Mirror of Priests within Albert's physical and conceptual spaces, Klepper affirms the centrality of the parish and its community for those living under the rubric of Christianity, especially outside of large cities. Pivoting between the materiality of texts and the sociocultural contexts of an overlooked manuscript tradition, Pastoral Care and Community in Late Medieval Germany offers fresh insights into the role of parish priests, the pastoral manual genre, and late medieval religious life.

"A wonderful book--nuanced, lively, vastly erudite. . . . Klepper has given us a look at Nicholas of Lyra that will become a classic study of this most important figure."--E. Ann Matter, University of Pennsylvania In the year 1309, Nicholas of Lyra, an important Franciscan Bible commentator, put forth a question at the University of Paris, asking whether it was possible to prove the advent of Christ from scriptures received by the Jews. This question reflects the challenges he faced as a Christian exegete determined to value Jewish literature during an era of increasing hostility toward Jews in western Europe. Nicholas's literal commentary on the Bible became one of the most widely copied and disseminated of all medieval Bible commentaries. Jewish commentary was, as a result, more widely read in Latin Christendom than ever before, while at the same moment Jews were being pushed farther and farther to the margins of European society. His writings depict Jews as stubborn unbelievers who also held indispensable keys to understanding Christian Scripture. In "The Insight of Unbelievers," Deeana Copeland Klepper examines late medieval Christian use of the Hebrew Bible and Jewish interpretation of Scripture, focusing on Nicholas of Lyra as the most important mediator of Hebrew traditions. Klepper highlights the important impact of both Jewish literature and Jewish unbelief on Nicholas of Lyra and on Christian culture more generally. By carefully examining the place of Hebrew and rabbinic traditions in the Christian study of the Bible, "The Insight of Unbelievers" elaborates in new ways on the relationship between Christian and Jewish scholarship and polemic in late medieval Europe. Deeana Copeland Klepper is a member of the faculty of the Department of Religion at Boston University.