The Cult of the Free Spirit: A Medieval Heresy Reconstructed

It is (I think) fairly generally realized that not all medieval religion was to be found within the Roman Catholic church. In the later middle ages—in the four centuries from, say, 1100 to 1500—there appeared various kinds of religion which were condemned by the church as heretical. Some of these unorthodox religious movements are well known to students of medieval history. Much has been written of the Waldensians or Vaudois, who were Bible-studying Christians and in some ways precursors of the Protestant Reformation. And much has also been written about the Neo-Manichean or Albigensian churches, which maintained in southern Europe a dualist religion imported from the Balkans and from further east. But in addition to these comparatively celebrated sects there existed an unorthodox religious tradition of another kind, and one which has been much less studied. It can fittingly be called the cult of the Free Spirit, and it is about this cult that I propose to speak.

The cult of the Free Spirit has long been regarded as one of the most perplexing and mysterious phenomena in medieval history. Indeed, it has often been suggested that no such movement existed at all, that it was simply a horrific invention of clerics whose one concern was to discredit every kind of religious dissent. Yet these doubts are quite unfounded, and they could exist only so long as no attempt was made to use all the sources available. For those sources are abundant. On the one hand there are the hostile sources—the reports of inquisitorial interrogations, the warnings and condemnations uttered by popes and bishops, the polemical dissertations of