Dear List: 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. Some, it seems clear,
were Judaizing, as their enemies maintained, but most, it appears, were
not. What many of them shared with the Jewish community (as with Muslims)
was a relative absence of a formally demarcated ecclesiastical order.
Also, to judge by the Cathars (surely a vastly important religion), not
all were moved by communitarian beliefs on the model of the Acts of the
Apostles. In my reading, Catharism in its heyday was a relatively
upper-class faith, unlike most of the Waldensians, Humiliati, etc. And
also only sects of the Waldensian type seem to have insisted on a measure
of real equality for women in an institutional sense, although most
religions seem to assert it in a "spiritual" sense. As to manual labor,
that's more Waldensian-type than Cathar-type also, or so it seems.
Lastly, it is surely unlikely that communitarianism, an accent on manual
labor and the institutional equality of women and men were characteristic
of the general run of medieval Judaism. John Mundy
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