In August 1976 the remains of a substantial building were uncovered in the courtyard of the Palais de Justice at Rouen, by the street which has been called at least since 1116 the rue aux Juifs (see plate I). That it was a Jewish building is confirmed by the Hebrew graffiti on its interior walls. It can be dated firmly to the years around 1100 by its scale, style, and workmanship, which are strongly reminiscent of the so-called ‘Norman exchequer’ in the ducal castle at Caen. The quality of its masonry is as good as may be found anywhere in northern Europe at this time. The function of the building is not altogether certain. At 14.14 X 9.46 metres, with at least one storey above the ground floor, it seems too large for a private dwelling, and indeed it is bigger than any known synagogue of this date north of the Alps. Not only the graffiti, but the lions of Judah finely carved at the base of one column, and the dragon from Psalm 91 on another, strongly suggest a religious purpose. The synagogue was on this street, but it is usually thought to have been on the south side, opposite the Palais de Justice site. This has led Norman Golb, the author of a major study of the Jewish community at Rouen, to suggest that the building unveiled in 1976 was a school, which acted as a centre of advanced study, not only for the Jewry of Rouen, but for a much larger region in which educational and scholarly activity is attested throughout the twelfth century by a rich crop of surviving manuscripts and other references, including many from places like Pont-Audemer, Touques, Falaise, Evreux, and Coutances, which were by no means major urban centres at this time.
One of the most obvious novelties of the eleventh century is the appearance of the crowd on the stage of public events. It would not claim to rival its counterparts in Antiquity or the Renaissance in the permanence of its presence or the scale of its activity, still less in the vividness with which it can be portrayed, or the wonders of analysis that can be performed upon it by its historians. Some of them, indeed, might hesitate to distinguish categorically between thepopuluswhich attacked the clergy of Milan in 1056 or formed an army for Peter the Hermit and that which surrounded the tomb of a Merovingian saint or attended the court of a Carolingian lord. But to indulge that hesitation to the point of silence would be to grant to semantics priority over common sense. It is impossible to contemplate the events of the eleventh century, to observe the turbulence of Florence in the 1060s or the Flemish and Rhineland cities in the 1070s, to hear a Gregory VII appealing to the people to boycott their priests and spurn their bishops, a Sigebert of Gembloux lamenting ‘sudden unrest among the populace, new treacheries of servants against their masters and masters’ mistrust of their servants', or a Marbod of Rennes protesting that to denounce the errors of the clergy before the people was ‘not to preach but to undermine’, without conceding not only that a new fear of social upheaval had been generated, but that in some manner it was founded in reality, that the course of events had been changed, and changed significantly on occasion, by the availability of the force of popular indignation to those who knew how to raise it. And quite clearly ‘knowing how to raise it’ was, for the greater part of the century, a religious matter, at least in the sense that the language that stirred the passions of the mob was religious language: the cry that brought out the crowds was that priests were unchaste, or simoniacal or corrupt, a whole generation and more before it became effective to raise the shout for a commune, or against the Jews, or towards the holy places.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. The MIT Press and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the editors of The Journal of Interdisciplinary History are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Journal of Interdisciplinary History. REVIEWS 659 stimulates; but, unlike the first book, it is itself a sign of the past. It is the most recent book of the I968 revolution, of the merger between the anti-ideological positions of the I96os and the recent ideologies of feminism and the antinuclear movement.A century after the publication of Lea's History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, Moore implicitly intends to resuscitate the liberal historiography of medieval intolerance by proposing, with the aid of socialscience theory, that persecution of deviance was introduced systematically into high-medieval society by concerted acts of state.1 Moore's aim is not to indulge in liberal judgmentalism but to counter the currently reigning historicist view that high-medieval persecution was inevitable, either because medieval society always regarded assaults on deviance as normal, or because particularly intense high-medieval religiosity made orderly inquisitorial procedures the only practical alternative to the outrages of fanatical lynch mobs.Moore begins by arguing that medieval Western Europe was not inclined toward persecution before the year oo000 but became a "persecuting society" during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and especially during the years between c. II60 and 1215. Not only were heretics and Jews first systematically persecuted then, but so were lepers. Presuming that the simultaneity of concerted action against these three groups cannot be dismissed as coincidental, Moore then endeavors to demonstrate that the new zeal for persecution arose not from mass hysteria but from "decisions of princes and prelates" (123). Finally, he proposes to make sense of this development by treating it as a product of Europe's twelfth-century transformation from "segmentary to state society" (I 5). In accordance with a theoretical analysis taken in part from Emile Durkheim and in part from Max Weber, Moore builds to the conclusion that social stresses inherent in the twelfth-century commercial and governmental revolutions made persecuting policies necessary as they had never been before. With Durkheim, he believes that "the purpose of defining individuals or groups as deviant [that is, persecuting them] is to reinforce the unity of the rest" (Io6-Io7). But he diverges from Durkheim in denying that society at large defines deviance; rather, with Weber, he believes that the ruthless forging of "a superior community of faith"-in twelfth-century Europe as in Weber's classical China-REVIEWS 659
Although they still differ considerably in their willingness to acknowledge it, specialists in the history of north-western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries CE are increasingly treating it as that of the emergence of a new civilization in what had previously been a peripheral region of the Mediterranean-based civilization of the classical west, rather than as a continuation or revival of that civilization itself. In this light Europe, or Latin Christendom as it saw itself, offers a number of striking resemblances to the developments which Lieberman discusses. The most dynamic regions of the new Europe—north-western France, Flanders and lowland England, north-eastern Spain, northern Italy, southern Italy and Sicily—were all peripheral, though in various senses, both to the long-defunct classical civilization and its direct successors, the Byzantine and Abbasid Empires, and to the transitional and much more loosely based ninth-and tenth-century empires of the Franks and Saxons (Ottonians). To this one might add that by the end of the twelfth century the remaining rimlands of the Eurasian continent in a purely geographical sense—Scandinavia, including Iceland, and still more the southern coast of the Baltic and the areas dominated by the rivers which drained into it—were developing very rapidly indeed.
Both the level of clerical anxiety about popular heresy in the century or so after 1140 and the breadth and vigour of measures adopted to suppress it, initially in the Languedoc, were disproportionate to its extent, coherence and support. This article therefore seeks an alternative explanation for the launching of the ‘war against heresy’ in thirteenth‐century Europe, and finds it primarily in the developing self‐consciousness of the new administrative elite produced by the demographic and cultural transformation of Europe in the eleventh century.
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