The War On Heresy

A narrative history covering the period c .1000 to c. 1300 AD, making no assumptions about what readers already know and which presents the following argument: there were countless variations in religious belief and practice in the first centuries of the second millennium - as there had been practically since the beginning of the first - but none was a threat: unorthodox doctrine in itself posed no danger to church or secular authority and was not a source of serious anxiety before the middle of the twelfth century. The threat of heresy was manufactured, pursued less to save souls than to gain influence and power in a world of revolutionary social change.