This epigraph, taken from Walter Benjamin, suggests the double responsibility of historiography to the present and the past. The main historical concerns of this book are the role of pedagogy and the role of intellectuals in a medieval dissenting movement. But the politics of teaching and the social functions of intellectuals are also crucial concerns of modern cultural reflection. Modernity hardly recognizes itself in the Middle Ages; on the other hand, medievalists have often argued the explanatory power of the Middle Ages for the conditions of modernity. What this book offers, however, is a study of issues that were of profound importance for the Middle Ages and that will disappear from our historiographical map if we do not recognize them as being important to ourselves. I do not offer this account of pedagogy and intellectuals in a medieval dissenting movement in order to explain modern conditions of teaching and intellectual labor. Rather, my interest here is to make visible certain forms of medieval cultural knowledge which historiography has suppressed because it has imagined that these could not be medieval forms of knowledge, because moderns (including modern medievalists) have not seen their own concerns in these images of the past.