Proving Woman (32 page)

The symbol of Francis as a papal legate is both situationally and ideologically at the center of this series of similes, heralded
by the preceding points and adumbrated by the subsequent ones.
¹⁸⁸
The legate was, by this period, an arm of the pope—not only authorized to act on the pope’s behalf, but further upholding
and representing the full weight of papal dignity and authority. And the full import of the identification of Francis as legate
ultimately presages the fourth and last conclusion, which is undoubtedly the most compelling in every sense of the word, but
also the most frighteningly simple. To assert that the stigmata were not supernaturally imposed is heretical.
¹⁸⁹
Such a conclusion sets the limits on scholarly debate and serves as a reminder that this inquiry, like the majority of scholastic
exercises, simply aspires to proving (and thereby confirming) an already established point of dogma. Thus its status as a
compulsory belief is not only the starting point for discussion but a final trump card when all else fails.

But if Peter’s conclusions were scholastic, not all of them were purely “academic” in the dismissive sense of the term. To
deny the efficacy of the stigmata was not only heretical in theory; it could also be treated as such. In 1361, the Silvestrine
monk Brother Leonardus of Foligno tested this principle, only to prove it true. Leonardus not only challenged the stigmata
but chose to do so before an unpropitious audience—a group of Franciscan nuns, who doubtless denounced him to the inquisitors.
The document that results from the ensuing inquisition is, once again, comparable to a bizarrely inverted parody of the depositions
attesting to the miracles of a saint for purposes of canonization. In this instance, however, the witnesses testify to the
fact that the defendant was doing his own testifying
against
a papally confirmed miracle. The inquisitorial task is thus oriented toward garnering proof of heretical depravity, not sanctity.

According to the depositions of the nuns, the sole witnesses who testified, Brother Leonardus not only opposed the veneration
of the stigmata in theory, which he argued set Francis up as a new God;
¹⁹⁰
he also thought that the stigmata themselves were faked. Although Leonardus may have made these claims more than once,
¹⁹¹
on at least one memorable occasion a number of witnesses were present. Leonardus’s remarks were prompted by a sermon that
he heard concerning the life and miracles of Francis. His injudicious response was to assert not only that the friars themselves
were responsible for the stigmata, but that Francis was complicit. Francis maliciously permitted himself to fall out of an
olive tree (
de quadam oliva
turpiter cecidit
), thus creating wounds that the brothers supplemented with paint.
¹⁹²
This was done solely for gain (
propter lucrum
).
¹⁹³
A rather plodding empiricist, Leonardus further questioned how Francis could possibly have obtained the stigmata in any event,
since he was never crucified. Moreover, why is it, Leonardus asked, that John the Evangelist or holy James never merited these
signs of devotion, if we are to believe that Francis did?
¹⁹⁴
Leonardus thus concluded that Francis and his followers alike were deserving of excommunication for their ruse.
¹⁹⁵
The audience was not particularly receptive to such freewheeling speculation: a certain Corradus Martini, after arguing with
Leonardus for some time, finally became exasperated and popped him in the jaw. The commotion attracted the attention of the
majority of the sisters, who came running out of the convent to learn the meaning of this fracas.
¹⁹⁶

Leonardus eventually backed down. He confessed to the inquisitors that what he had said was not intentionally heretical but
resulted from a mere slip of the tongue and a lack of deliberation (
dicit se non dixisse
mente heretica sed lassu lingue et ex indeliberatione
), and he was assigned appropriate penance.
¹⁹⁷
But the cult of Francis was not the only official cult that suffered from disaffection. The cults of the two most famous inquisitors,
Peter Martyr and Dominic (who, while predating the actual appointments of inquisitors, was widely perceived as one), required
constant vigilance. The revolt against the inquisition staged by the people of Albi in 1302, witnessed and described by inquisitor
Bernard Gui, was marked by a substitution of images: those of Dominic and Peter Martyr were replaced by two of the rebel leaders.
The restoration of the inquisitor- saints occurred only when the rebellion was quelled.
¹⁹⁸
Many papal bulls and acts of the Dominican chapter further attest to the difficulty of policing the cults surrounding these
inquisitors. Papal defensiveness would be redoubled with regard to Dominic and Peter Martyr, for the Dominicans, like the
Franciscans, had special ties to the papacy—ties that freed the mendicants from local authorities and made them answerable
to the pope alone. Moreover, the inquisition itself existed in an even more complete symbiosis with the papacy. Thus skepticism
with regard to these inquisitor-saints became associated with heresy: at least one inquisitional manual posed as a question
for interrogation whether suspects truly believed that Dominic and Peter Martyr were saints.
¹⁹⁹

Nor did this mantle of protection pertain only to saintly inquisitors; it was, not surprisingly, extended to the office itself.
Individuals who refused to cooperate with the inquisitors were treated as heretics, as were those who expressed doubts over
the validity of the tribunal. For example, in the course of the inquisition against the Cathars undertaken in Bologna between
1291 and 1310, individuals were indicted for challenging the inquisitors’ right to excommunicate or to confiscate property.
Some of them denied the efficacy of the death penalty. Others attempted to turn the tables by claiming that those who experienced
trouble and tribulation at the hands of the inquisitors won considerable merit with God.
²⁰⁰
A certain Recevutus basterius asserted that the friars sinned in condemning anyone, even heretics, and that relinquishing
them to the secular arm was a sin against God. “Howcan this be since Godwishes and ordained justice be done on earth?” asked
Corbicincus, the witness responsible for reporting the conversation. Recevutus answered: “That is not so, because God did
not ordain this, nor did he wish it to be done thus.”One defendant thought the inquisitors deserved burning along with Saint
Dominic, even if the latter could be burned only in effigy.
²⁰²
Many believed that the inquisitors “made men into heretics [
fratres faciebant homines
hereticos
]”; others that the inquisitors “were greater heretics than the said Bompetrus [
erant magis heretici quam dictus Bompetrus
],” a notorious Cathar who had just been condemned and burned.
²⁰³
A large proportion of witnesses expressed outrage at the burning of the bones of a certain Rosaflora, a former heretic who
received the sacrament on her deathbed, arguing that her condemnation was for monetary gain alone.
²⁰⁴
Similarly, in the contemporaneous trial of the Guglielmites, the inquisitors became aware of a rumor that they themselves
had been suspended from office and had no authority—a story abetted by the local Franciscans, whose antagonism to their Dominican
confreres was typical of the rivalry between the two orders. The inquisitors simply incorporated the rumor into their cross-examinations,
using it as yet another touchstone for heresy.
²⁰⁵

The Franciscan Bernard Délicieux, the impetus behind the revolt of the people of Albi alluded to above, probably constitutes
the most famous instance of clerical resistance to the inquisition. After a career of activism that spanned some twenty years,
Bernard was eventually tried and degraded by Dominican inquisitors in 1319—an insufficient punishment in the view of Gui,
who reports that “he was punished, but not fully.”
²⁰⁶
But clerical opposition to the inquisition was hardly limited to intermendicant hostilities and could be as subtle as it was
ubiquitous. Thus in Bologna, the rector Iacobus of the church of Saint Thomas del Mercato was called before the inquisition
for confessing, absolving, and administering penance and last rites to Rosaflora, considered a relapsed heretic, seemingly
so he could accord her a Christian burial. Moreover, even if the late Rosaflora had not relapsed into heresy, her disrespect
for the inquisitors was in itself culpable. After her husband, Bonigrinus, was burned as a heretic, she had actually driven
an inquisitor away from her door with curses and death threats.
²⁰⁷
When the mystic Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) was brought before the inquisitional tribunal, the mentally unstable cleric Guiard
de Cressonessart attempted to intervene on her behalf. Guiard’s infirmity was such that he believed he was the Angel of Philadelphia,
possessed of a divine mission to protect others from ecclesiastical persecution.
²⁰⁸
In the south of France, a number of individuals who symto pathized with the heretical Spiritual Franciscans were themselves
clerics, among them the rabble-rousing Bernard Délicieux.
²⁰⁹
Inquisitor Bernard Gui even provides a form for the sentencing and immuring of a religious who opposed the inquisition, which
is seemingly based on a true case. It describes at length howa Dominican friar preached against the inquisition by impugning
its processes as hyperbolic fictions, arguing that true Catholics were tortured and made to confess themselves heretics, appealing
to the secular authorities to obstruct the inquisition’s progress, and generally inciting the populace against the inquisitors.
Obstinate throughout the trial, the intractable friar was at length condemned as a heretic. Although Bernard Délicieux eventually
abjured his heresy and was absolved, he was nevertheless degraded and perpetually imprisoned. The fact that such a form merits
inclusion in the manual suggests that the offense was by no means uncommon.
²¹⁰

That clerical intervention should be perceived as obstructionist to orthodoxy is but a sign of the times. In the early days
of the inquisition, clerical opposition to Conrad of Marburg’s methods and sympathy for his lay victims seem to have been
heeded. Indeed, some of Conrad’s highly placed clerical critics garnered the title of martyr for those who met with death
in the course of his purge. Clerical intervention would also bring the contemporaneous inquisitor Robert le Bougre’s reign
of terror to an end. But the introduction of uniform procedures had the effect of not merely concealing inquisitorial excesses
but even sanctioning the machinery itself. Nows uch clerically mounted resistance was regarded as heresy.
²¹¹

If the resistance to the claims of an officially authorized saint could precipitate charges of heresy, the same claims on
behalf of an individual who was known to have been officially condemned were more dangerous still. It was clearly more than
simple cheek that inspired the inhabitants of Albi to substitute portraits of neighbors recently condemned by the inquisition
for the despised images of Dominic and Peter Martyr. But gestures that defiantly invert inquisitorial verdicts are exemplified
in the early-fourteenth-century interrogations of the Beguins of Clermont-l’Hérault, Lod[egrave]ve, and Narbonne—“Beguin”
in this context denoting the often lay supporters of the Spiritual Franciscans as opposed to the female movement of the Low
Countries.
²¹²
James Given has aptly labeled these trials “a contested performance,” one in which inquisitorial action consistently gave
rise to unintended effects. For instance, attendance at the general sermon for sentencing was customarily regarded as mandatory
for all. This emphasis on compulsory attendance was sustained by the conviction that the various sentences would act as a
deterrent to heretical error, a message powerfully reinforced by public executions. Yet these palpable displays of inquisitional
power worked to the opposite effect, creating a newgeneration of martyrs.
²¹³

The central “heresy” that permeates the testimonies of these otherwise conventionally pious people is the conviction that
the Spiritual Francis-cans and their supporters were unjustly put to death and were thus “saints and glorious martyrs.” The
following responses are typical. Manenta, wife of Bernardus Arnaud of Lod[egrave]ve, believed the Beguins to be saints on
account of “the bitterness of the lives they endured.”
²¹⁴
Bernardus Malaura of Lod[egrave]ve claimed that he had “never seen people die so sweetly,” that the deceased “were unjustly
condemned and were saved and holy, and that in time it will be revealed that they are saints.”
²¹⁵
The priest Bernardus Pirotas twice officiated at a general office for martyrs on behalf of the deceased, offering a daytime
and an evening service.
²¹⁶

Some of the accused went on to impugn the papacy, the Conventual Franciscans, or the inquisitors for their role in the condemnation
of the innocent. The notary Bernardus Sabri, for instance, perceived the condemnation of the Beguins in the context of a greater
eschatological upheaval. Their deaths signified that the life of Christ had been rejected sophistically (
sophistice
) by the city of Babylon, which was identified as the carnal church. The church would, in its turn, be destroyed by ten Saracen
kings, an event that would anticipate the coming of Antichrist.
²¹⁷
But the inquisitors did not need so flamboyant a narrative to understand the position of the Beguins, recognizing the string
of errors attendant upon the invocation of the term “martyr.” For if the laity, nurtured by Scripture and saints’ lives, cast
the condemned heretics as martyrs, they were automatically associating the inquisitors themselves with the venal judges of
Christ or of the early martyrs. Some of the witnesses were even prepared to make this connection explicit: thus Berengarius
Jaoule of Lode` ve perceived the Beguins “who suffered patiently hitherto through the ministers of the Roman church in the
likeness of Christ, who had suffered persecution through priests and ministers of the law.”
²¹⁸
Those who sympathized with the dead Beguins thus did what the pious Christians of the early church had done in similar circumstances,
in keeping with the advocacy of clerics like James of Vitry and Thomas of Cantimpréon behalf of relics of the recent dead:
the Beguins collected the remains of the tattered bodies of the deceased, which seem to have survived in profusion. 219 These
remains were instantly accorded the same status as relics and were treated as such. For some, a relic would serve as a viaticum,
carried around just as James of Vitry had carried the finger of his spiritual mother, Mary of Oignies. Thus Berengaria, a
matron from Narbonne, carried a little bone “with reverence just as [one of] the relics of saints.”
²²⁰
Galharda, wife to the eschatologically minded notary Bernardus, suppressed her occasional doubts about the status of the remains
in her keeping and offered a conditional petition to the putative saint. Reverently touching the relics first to her mouth
and then to each of her eyes, she prayed, “ ‘If you are the bones of saints, help me.’ ”
²²¹