Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages: 1000-1200 - Hardcover

"Fichtenau has undertaken to write an extended essay on nonconformity in the twelfth century, and he has found it located in two primary notional regions: in popular heresy and in the arrogant rationality of the schools. . . [The book's] parts . . . are formidable, and any scholar will find stimulation in an essay written in a style both informative and provocative. . . . The result is an analysis of the twelfth century as fruitful and interesting as any of the much-touted medievalist products of the French school so much more readily translated into English than German works these days."--Steven Rowan, Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies

The struggle over fundamental issues erupted with great fury in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this book preeminent medievalist Heinrich Fichtenau turns his attention to a new attitude that emerged in Western Europe around the year 1000. This new attitude was exhibited both in the rise of heresy in the general population and in the self-confident rationality of the nascent schools. With his characteristic learning and insight, Fichtenau shows how these two separate intellectual phenomena contributed to a medieval world that was never quite as uniform as might appear from our modern perspective.