Proving Woman (33 page)

Occasionally one can follow the reverent traffic in the relics of a specific individual, such as Esclarmonda Durban, who was
burned at Lunel. The drama surrounding Esclarmonda’s body is like an uncanny recasting of the tragedy of Antigone. In this
medieval adaptation, however, it is two brothers from Clermont who are prepared to risk their lives to ensure a fitting disposition
of their sister’s body—a body that, as with the siblings of the Greek antecedent, was denied proper burial. The behavior of
the two brothers reveals the way in which familial piety and the cult of relics could reinforce one another. Esclarmonda’s
brother Bernardus had been present when his sister was sentenced, and had been disturbed by certain irregularities. The press
of people made it impossible for him to hear the charges made against her. But he was later told that when she asked to have
her confession read back to her, as was standard procedure, this request was denied. As a result, Bernardus could not help
but wonder whether Esclarmonda had received a fair trial. Bernardus was present at her execution and returned the following
day, accompanied by his brother Raymondus and some others, to reclaim the largely intact body of Esclarmonda. Bernardus reverently
placed some of his sister’s remains in the wall of his house, keeping them, as he told the inquisitors, out of love for her
memory.
²²²

Raymondus’s account is more graphic. They broke Esclarmonda’s body into pieces and placed it in a sack. One of his companions
kept her heart, while Raymondus kept some of her flesh and bones concealed in a hole in his house. When asked about what he
intended by this, Raymondus claims that he had hoped that, at some future point, Esclarmonda’s name would be cleared: he believed
that she and the others who were executed were good people who had suffered persecution unjustly. But now he had abandoned
hope of any such rehabilitation.
²²³

Bernardus and Raymondus relied on familial affection to justify their reverence for Esclarmonda before the inquisitors. But
the testimony of others suggests that Esclarmonda had a particular reputation for holiness, and that her cult was by no means
confined to the family circle. Martinus of Saint Antonius, an inhabitant of Clermont, is the individual to whom Esclarmonda’s
heart was entrusted. When he showed it to some other Beguins, they kissed the heart and signed it with a cross. His relic
was clearly the object of some envy since another Beguin urged him to cut the heart down the middle to share it, but Martinus
refused.
²²⁴
(The person in question was probably the priest Bernardus Pirotas, who admits that, having been shown a heart, he requested
a portion.)
²²⁵
When asked by the inquisitors why Martinus distinguished Esclarmonda particularly, he replied that he was impressed by her
perseverance and the good life she led, and that he had been told that her confession had not been read back to her, suggesting
that she had been unjustly condemned.
²²⁶
Berangarius Rocha also claims to have seen someone kissing the heart of one of the Beguins who was executed, and it may well
have been Esclarmonda’s.
²²⁷

Inquisitor Nicolas Eymeric alleged that the heretical Franciscans who spread the heresy of the Beguins were popular among
“congregations of wretched little women [
muliercularum
].”
²²⁸
But clearly women were well represented not only as followers but also as objects of veneration. Other women besides Esclarmonda
seem to have achieved cultic status. In fact, the cults surrounding the martyred Beguin women seem to have been especially
active, existing on a natural continuum with the rise of female lay sanctity in the orthodox sphere. Among this particular
set of testimonies, only women are distinguished for particular holiness. Jacoba Amorosia, a matron of Lod[egrave]ve, confessed
that she had been given the nipple of a certain woman from among the deceased.
²²⁹
In a furtive visit to one of the sites of execution, Bernardus Malaura purposefully took the flesh of two women from his hometown
of Lod[egrave]ve (one was called Mezina and the other went by the nickname La Levada) whom he knew to have led particularly
good lives.
²³⁰
Berengarius Jaoule’s testimony also attests to the particular holiness of the women who were executed. Not only did he preserve
the flesh of a certain unnamed woman, but he also alludes to the reputations for sanctity of two others: Astruga of Lod[egrave]ve
and Amissat of Narbonne. Berengarius further alludes to rumors that the entire body of a woman had been taken from the execution
site at Lunel—perhaps the body of Esclarmonda.
²³¹

The full extent of orthodoxy’s role in producing antisaints was only partially acknowledged by the inquisitors themselves,
perhaps because this realization was too disturbing to be fully integrated into their purview. This is suggested in the trial
of the Beguin Petrus Dominici of Narbonne, a member of the Third Order Franciscans who was sentenced as a relapsed heretic
by Bernard Gui in 1322. When captured for a second time, Petrus refused to renounce his heretical beliefs, proclaiming that
the various Spiritual Franciscans and Beguins who were put to death by the inquisitors were martyrs. The individuals responsible
for their deaths were heretics, including the pope, since he countenanced their error. Moreover, all the sacraments administered
by this carnal lot were void.
²³²

Only after two months of imprisonment would Petrus agree to renounce his many errors, which he proceeded to do, article by
article, until he suddenly rallied—an occurrence that Gui describes as follows:

After a little while, the aforesaid Petrus Dominici pretended that he was out of his mind [
confingens se alienatum a sensu
], praising the aforesaid sect and the heresy of the devious followers of that sect, whom he heard and knew were already condemned
as heretics by church judgment. He knewand memorized their names and dared to record them in a litany that he wrote with his
own hand among the holy martyrs and virgins and confessors in the style of the church, saying the litany—nowin a high voice,
now in a lowone. And imploring many times the prayers of the damned men and their suffrages out of devotion to them for quite
some time, he conceived, and held, and believed that their prayers would help him before God, just as he asserted by his own
oath when arraigned in judgment. And that litany in which he wrote the names of the aforesaid damned individuals by hand,
which numbered around seventy, he read out loud in the presence of the inquisitor.
²³³

Clearly what we are witnessing does not resemble insanity so much as a courageous last stand. Facing certain death, Petrus
was determined to defy his carnal judges and die with the truth on his lips.
²³⁴
By describing this episode as feigned madness, Gui was either attempting to discredit heretical courage or, what is perhaps
more likely, demonstrating his own incapability of recognizing a heroism so at odds with his own ideology that it could register
only as a kind of madness.

At least on a theoretical level, Gui knewbetter . After all, one of the questions that his manual prompts the inquisitor to
ask is whether the suspect “believed or now believes that the said Beguins, who were condemned as heretics, were and are Catholic
and holy martyrs, suffering death to defend the truth. . . . Also whether he believed or now believes that those who condemned
them as heretics themselves became heretics in so doing.”
²³⁵
Beguins answered yes to both and died as a result. Their trials provide vivid testimony as to why the cults of the martyred
inquisitors had so little chance of succeeding against so prolix and moving a competition. It was like an eerie return to
the early church when the inquisitional procedure first revealed its potential for unintended effects—thwarting the pagan
inquisitors by providing a platform for Christian heroism, the witnessing of which was said to have provoked many conversions.
In the High and later Middle Ages, heretics would become saints and inquisitors would become heretics, once again realizing
the inquisition’s unnerving powers of reversal.

¹
William Pelhisson,
Chronique (1229–1244), Suivie de récit des troubles d’Albi
, ed. and trans. Jean Duvernoy (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1994), pp. 62–63. On the
informality of episcopal inquiries, see Yves Dossat, “La répression de l’hérésie par les év ê ques,”
Cahiers de Fanjeaux
6 (1971): 238–39.

²
AndréVauchez,
Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages
, trans. Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 11–21.

³
This is the general view. See Raoul Manselli, “De la ‘persuasio’ [agrave] la ‘coercitio,’ ”
Cahiers de
Fanjeaux
6 (1971): 176–77. R. I. Moore, however, presents persecution as imposed in a top-down way by the church, in
The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Power and Deviance in Western
Europe, 950
–
1250
(Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

⁴
Lateran IV, c. 8, 3, 62, Tanner, 1:237–39; 233–34, 263–64. See Vauchez,
Sainthood
, pp. 26–32.

⁵
Lateran IV, c. 3, Tanner, 1:223–24. For an overview of the inquisition from Roman times to its introduction into the church
in the thirteenth century, see Célestin Douais,
L
’
Inquisition: Ses origines
—
sa proc
è
dure
(Paris: Librairie Plon, 1906), pp. 2–20. Manselli sees 1179–84 as the crucial years during which the church would assume a
more coercive stance toward heretics (“De la ‘persuasio’ a` la ‘coercitio,’ ” pp. 185–86). Peter Diehl situates the laity’s
attitudinal change in the first half of the thirteenth century, claiming that, with some exceptions, the inquisition was eventually
supported by the laity, in “Overcoming Reluctance to Prosecute Heresy in Thirteenth-Century Italy,” in
Christendom and Its Discontents: Exclusion, Persecution, and Rebellion, 1000
–
1500
, ed. Scott Waugh and Peter Diehl (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 47–66.

⁶
Vauchez,
Sainthood
, pp. 36–40, 50.

⁷
See chap. 1, pp. 25–27, and chap. 3, pp. 90–91, above.

⁸
See especially the
Processus inquisitionis
of Narbonne (ca. 1249), the work of inquisitors Bernard of Caux and John of Saint Pierre and the first manual of its kind.
It is translated in Walter Wakefield,
Heresy, Crusade, and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100
–
1250
(London: George Allen and Unwin, 1974), app. 6, pp. 250–58. On its authorship, see Yves Dossat, “Le plus ancien manuel de
l’inquisition méridionale: le
Processus inquisitionis (1248
–
1249
),”
Bulletin philologique
et historique, du comite
é
des travaux historiques et scientifiques
, année 1948, pp. 33–37. Also see Antoine Dondaine, “Le manuel de l’inquisiteur (1230–1330),”
AFP
17 (1947): 97–101. Note, however, that Dondaine assigns the manual to inquisitors William Raymond and Peter Durand since the
sole manuscript begins with their letter of commission. Dondaine points out that the language and various stages outlined
in this brief manual are those of a full-fledged inquisition—including a letter of commission,
modus citandi
,
formula interrogatorii
, etc. Moreover, the formularies included are real documents, retaining none of the theoretical or speculative aspects of
Raymond of Peñafort’s directory (pp. 98–99). For a general overview of the inquisition’s organization and process, see Lea,
Inquisition
, 1:369–429. Two interesting recent works describe the inqui sition’s exercise of power in Foucauldian terms. See John Arnold’s
Inquisition and Power: Catharism
and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc
(Philadelpia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), and James Given’s
Inquisition and Medieval Society: Power, Discipline, and Resistance
in Languedoc
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1997).

⁹
William of Puylaurens,
Chronique. Cronica Magistri Guillelmi de Podio Laurentii
ann. 1242, c. 41, ed. and trans. Jean Duvernoy (Paris: Editions du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1976), pp.
150–53. See Lorenzo Paolini, “Gli ordini mendicanti e l’inquisizione: il ‘comportamento’ degli eretici e il giudizio sui frati,”
MEFRM
89, 2 (1977): 695–709.

¹⁰
See Bernard of Caux and John of Saint Pierre,
Processus inquisitionis
, p. 251;
Doctrina de
modo procedendi contra haereticis
, in
Thesaurus novus anecdotorum
, ed. E. Mart[egrave]ne and U. Durand (Paris: Lutetia, 1717; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), vol. 5, col. 1805. This
manual, written before 1298, is basically a compilation of four fragments, including Raymond of Peñafort’s compilation and
Bernard of Caux and John of Saint Pierre’s manual. See Dondaine, “Le manuel,” pp. 108–11. Cf. Lorenzo Paolini’s edition,
Il
“
De of
fi
cio inquisitionis
”
: La procedura
inquisitoriale a Bologna e a Ferrara nel Trecento
, 2 vols. (Bologna: Editrice Universitaria Bolognina, 1976). This anonymous work was written between 1320 and 1325 in lower
Lombardy and probably by a theologian, as opposed to a canonist. See Paolini’s introduction, 1:vi–xiii; Dondaine, “Le manuel,”
pp. 117–21.
De of
fi
cio inquisitionis
gives several different prescriptive versions of how the period of grace should be instituted (Paolini,
De of
fi
cio inquisitionis
, 2:125–29; cf. 1:77–79). Also see Gui Foucois’s
Quaestiones quindecim ad inquisitores
, printed in the appendix of Caesar Carena’s
Tractatus de of
fi
cio sanctissimae inquisitionis et modo procedendi in causis Fidei
(Cremona: Baptistam Belpierum, 1655), q. 2, p. 402. This short manual of the late thirteenth century was especially influential
since the author became Pope Clement IV. It was used extensively in the anonymous
De of
fi
cio inquisitionis
and in Gui’s manual. Regarding the period of grace, Bernard Gui, writing ca. 1323, notes that there are some occasions when
it would seem absurd (
Practica inquisitionis hereticae
4.2.4, ed. Célestin Douais [Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1886], p. 185); see Dondaine, “Le manuel,” pp. 115–21; for a summary of
Gui’s career, see Célestin Douais,
Documents pour servir [agrave] l
’
histoire de l
’
inquisition dans le Languedoc
(Paris: Librairie Renouard, 1900), 1:cciii–ccvi. Book 5 of Gui’s manual has been translated in
WE
, pp. 375–445.