Disentangling Heretics, Jews, and Muslims: Imagining Infidels in Late Medieval Pastoral Manuals

We discussed above concerning Jews and pagans [ Saracens ] , who dishonor God through infidelity. Now we wish to discuss heretics, who, by deviating from the faith, sin against God in many ways. Raymond of Penyafort, Summa de casibus de poenitentia ( c . 1224) We have heard about Jews and Saracens who, through infidelity, and obduracy, and depraved understanding or blindness, do not recognize the Lord, but blaspheme and dishonor him; now we will deal with heretics, who, apostatizing from faith, are seen to sin against God in many ways. Hostiensis, Summa aurea ( c . 1253) Indeed in sins you [ heretics ] surpass all, having been made more perfidious than Jews and crueler than pagans. Innocent III, Si adversus nos terra consurgeret (1205) As the epigraphs above illustrate, it was a commonplace in late medieval texts to describe the depth of a heretic's depravity by relationship to that of Jews, Muslims, or pagans, and the language used to do this seems to have intensified during the first half of the thirteenth century. R. I. Moore's The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987) notably made the case that new efforts to identify heretics, Jews, and other ‘marginalized’ groups of people as threats to Christian society in the twelfth century served an important social function in the construction of a new Christian body politic. In the decades since its publication, scholars have pushed back against some aspects of Moore's structuralist reading of the rise of inquisition and isolation of ‘outsiders’, but the notion that the twelfth century saw a new and fundamental linkage between Jews, heretics, Muslims, and other so-called marginal groups remains strong. Recent surveys of medieval heresy by Jennifer Kolpacoff Deane and Christine Caldwell Ames represent the state of the field well, and both embrace the notion that medieval Christians understood various categories of person to be members of a broadly construed group of ‘the infidel’. There is good reason for the wide acceptance of this framework; the language of canon law texts and commentaries, theological treatises, and judicial and political policies all provide plentiful support for it.