Forgive me for interrupting your discussion on the much more
intersting subject of Judaizing,, but I was
startled to be passed a comment from John Mundy that "Admirable
though Moore's work is, I agree with Landes that there were persons
in some quantity who diverged from, or held differing beliefs from
the post-Gregorian "orthodox" church."
I cannot believe that I have ever written anything
which could possibly suggest that I do not think that there were such
persons, in some quantity, both for some centuries after the
so-called Gregorian reform and, a fortiori, before it. If anyone
thinks I said it I apologise, but at least one of us must have been
well on the way at the time. On the contrary, ever since I wrote The
Origins of European Dissent almost the whole of my work has stemmed
from the (not particularly original) suspicion I then formed, since
hardened into certainty, that beliefs and practices characterised by
bishops and others as novelties were usually nothing of the kind, but
traditional beliefs and practices of which the said bishops had
begun, for reasons of their own, to express their disapproval. Most
of what I've published since has been directed to understanding the
reasons for the mounting disapproval, and has drawn me into an ever
firmer conviction that what such pronouncements assert is excellent
and often very interesting evidence for what is going on inside the
minds of those who make the assertions, and no evidence at all for
what was going on outside them. The disagreement in which I
regrettably find myself with Richard Landes arises essentially from
the fact that I do not see any reason to give such assertions of
novelty, heresy etc. any greater credence because they happen to have
been made in the vicinity of the millennium, or to be persuaded by
them that "the people", whoever they may have been, had suddenly
started getting up to things that they hadn't been getting up to
before. This does not mean that I imagine that what they
had been doing was behaving as obedient and faithful devotees of a
Gregorian church that didn't yet exist. It does not mean that I "
want to argue that these fears [if this means, all expressed fears,
or fears in general, or any class of fears, as distinct from
particular expressions of anxiety in particular sources] of popular
heresies are not related real heretics but to the persecuting
rhetoric of new elites who want to consolidate power by stigmatizing
their rivals". And it doesn't mean that I don't think that important,
even fundamental changes in social relations and religious attitudes
were taking place early in the eleventh century. It means that I
think that if we are to understand those changes properly we have to
be picky about what is or isn't evidence, and what (in the former
case) it's evidence of. I must say I'd be surprised to find myself at
odds with John Mundy, of all people, on that.
Bob Moore
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