Agnes of Harcourt (c. 1240–c. 1291) served for some seventeen years as the abbess of Longchamp, the female Franciscan community founded just west of Paris in 1260. Although a thorough study of her activities as abbess remains to be undertaken, the general outlines of her career seem fairly clear. Her parents, Jean I of Harcourt (d. 1288) and Alix of Beaumont (d. 1275), probably married around 1240. Agnes was likely one of their first children, if not their very first. By the 1250s, Agnes seems to have been part of the entourage of Isabelle of France (1225–1270), the sister of King Louis IX. Isabelle, for her part, was living a startlingly unusual life as a celibate princess at the Capetian court, but by 1254 she was working to found the first female Franciscan community in the Ile-de-France. A first version of the community's rule was approved by Alexander IV in 1259, and the initial group of nuns, including Agnes of Harcourt, took the veil in June 1260. In 1263 Urban IV approved a revised version of Longchamp's rule, which created the Order of Sorores minores inclusae, a distinct branch of the Franciscan family. Soon after, Agnes of Harcourt became the community's abbess for a first term that spanned approximately the years 1264 to 1275, and then a second from 1281 to 1287.

Agnes's status as daughter of an important noble family evidently bolstered her position at Longchamp. At least two other women from the Harcourt family in fact became nuns there as well: Agnes's aunt Jeanne (sister of Jean I of Harcourt) entered along with Agnes in 1260 and made over lands and goods to the community upon her profession, while Agnes's younger sister, also named Jeanne (d. 1315), joined the community around 1277 and eventually served as abbess herself from 1294 to 1299. Jean I of Harcourt gave lands and rents to the abbey, including in 1281 a donation for the younger Jeanne. The famille d’Harcourt was a pillar of support for Longchamp in its formative years.

For a millennium heresy has been central to ‘the making of European culture’. Indeed, claims for its centrality could be pushed back to well before the year 1000, to the Nicene Council and even earlier debates around the nature of Christian orthodoxy. But the formative battles of the Roman period were long past by the eleventh century when western Europe began its economic, demographic, and intellectual ‘leap’ forward toward the modern world. From the Gregorian reforms to the Protestant Reformation and beyond, heresies and heretics helped to shape the religious, political, and institutional structures that medieval Europe would bequeath to the modern West. Within this sweeping history, the late medieval period, traditionally understood as the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, presents a particularly diverse array of heterodox movements and modes of thought. Yet despite this richness, or perhaps because of it, some of the most intriguing heresies and heretics from this era of ‘paradox, tension, and unpredictability’ have been undervalued in wider studies, treated either as epilogues to the better-studied twelfth and thirteenth centuries or as preludes to the epoch-making religious revolutions of the sixteenth.

This introduction first addresses the historiographic landscape of medieval heresy, focusing in particular on periodization and its consequences. Then, as befitting a collection honoring the pioneering work of Robert E. Lerner, it outlines the elements of a ‘Lernerian’ approach to late medieval heresy and suggests ways in which this approach informs the new perspectives presented here.

The Historiographic Landscape

The work of the German historian Herbert Grundmann (1902–70) has profoundly influenced scholars of medieval religious history, including – as Richard Kieckhefer's preface notes – Robert Lerner. For the field as a whole, Grundmann's most influential work was undoubtedly his brilliant 1935 study of Religiöse Bewegungen im Mittelalter, which analyzed ways in which groups that cohered around spiritual, intellectual, and cultural ideals shared by broad swathes of European society could still end up forced into dissent or at least labeled as dissidents. In this analysis, a figure such as Valdes of Lyon partook in the apostolic impulses that animated many twelfth-century figures, but when his refusal to abandon lay preaching led to condemnation, he and his followers were labeled as heretics, and many ultimately came to understand themselves as opponents of the organized Church.

When Philip IV ordered the arrest of all Templars in France, he and his advisors set in motion a heresy inquisition of unprecedented ambition. Secret arrest orders accompanied by a set of vernacular instructions were sent to the king's secular agents across the kingdom on 14 September 1307. The inquisitor William of Paris followed with his own letter on 22 September, addressed to the Dominican inquisitors of Toulouse and Carcassonne, and to Dominican priors, subpriors, and lectors throughout the kingdom, asking them to stand ready to receive confessions. Arrests duly took place on 13 October. The plan was evidently to secure an overwhelming number of confessions as rapidly as possible and force Pope Clement V to condemn the Order of the Temple. The pope, however, first expressed his displeasure in a letter of 27 October, and on 22 November ordered that Templars across the rest of Europe be taken into custody for ecclesiastical trial. Clement then brought Philip IV and William of Paris up short in late January or early February 1308 by suspending the power of French inquisitors to act in this affair. When the pope finally agreed to restart the inquiries in July 1308, it was on his own terms, with such inquiries being entrusted to bishops working in concert with wider groups of churchmen.

Because the ‘Trial of the Templars’ in France has most often been studied as a conflict between Church and state rather than as an episode in the history of heresy and inquisition, it has gone largely unremarked that the events of fall 1307 amounted to an audacious effort to create a proto-national heresy inquisition in France. As Julien Théry has argued, the attack on the Templars must be understood within the decade-long drive to build a ‘royal theocracy’ with Philip IV as ‘pope in his kingdom’. But within this process of ‘pontificalizing’ the French monarchy, only in 1307 did the king and his men attempt to seize control of a crucial aspect of papal authority – the power to deploy heresy inquisition. Beginning in 1301, the attacks on Bishop Bernard Saisset, Pope Boniface VIII, the Templars, and Bishop Guichard of Troyes often used the language of heretical danger to represent the king as the defender of Christ against His enemies. But only the proceedings against the Templars invoked the authority of an inquisitor of heretical depravity.

In 2004, the French publishing house Gallimard published Héros du Moyen Âge: le saint et le roi, a 1,318-page tome combining two recent works by Jacques Le Goff, one about Francis of Assisi and the other Louis IX of France. The subtitle is slightly misleading, since both ‘heroes’ were in fact recognised as saints after Louis's canonisation in 1297. Nevertheless, it is no surprise that Le Goff would find these two men intriguing, or that Gallimard would pair them, for they were two of the thirteenth century's emblematic figures, linked by the influence that Franciscan ideals had on Louis, his family and his Capetian descendants.

This influence is undeniable but difficult to pin down, for several reasons. First, there is the problem of defining ‘Franciscan ideals’. Francis's admirers and modern scholars have long argued over who he ‘really was’ and how his message should best be interpreted. Thus, we cannot simply ask whether the French royal court followed one predetermined model arbitrarily defined as Franciscan. Secondly, there is the problem of disentangling Franciscan piety from other related strands. The French court fostered close ties to many different orders and branches of the Church. It would therefore be disingenuous to ascribe every Capetian impulse towards piety, simplicity or humility to Franciscan influence. Searching for Franciscan influence requires close attention to actual interaction between royal figures and leading Franciscans and to structural links built up between court and order.