The Doctrine of the Method of Proceeding Against Heretics, or, “No One Expects the Southern French Inquisition!”

A long time ago, before Wikipedia or Facebook or Twitter or even MySpace were much if anything, there was an online community called H2G2, the brainchild of a British fellow named Douglas Adams. H2G2 (an odd acronym for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) was a little bit of all of the above mentioned products but created with a completely non-commercial purpose: it was meant to be a completely open, user-generated encyclopedia. This, of course, sounds a bit like Wikipedia, but H2G2 (“Hootoo” to most users) began as, and, I suspect, remains a much more creative place than is Wikipedia. Original research and work has been at the heart of H2G2 from its beginning and many of the entries are downright loopy. But even deeper into the heart of H2G2, in my opinion, was the incomprehensibly huge and varied (and often technically unmanageable — hence the migration to management by the BBC and the site’s later migration away from the BBC) conversation threads. These threads ranged from simple two person conversation which might last for years (digital penpals), through careful peer-review discussions of entries submitted for the Edited Guide, to global, sometimes heated, but almost always respectful discussions/arguments about whatever subject you could possibly imagine.

Hootoo kept me going through a challenging period which happened to almost perfectly coincide with the site’s residence at the BBC, so, often, when talking to real-world people about my time as an active contributor to H2G2, I refer to it as “the BBC thing”. The conversations I had there late at night (my time) with people all over the world are invaluable to me. And some of the Edited Entries I wrote for the Guide later helped get me my first paid writing gigs.

But that’s all background to the story I’m telling this evening.

One day or night — I don’t remember when exactly it was — while scrolling through the recent conversation threads I came across one that was titled something like “help with a bit of Medieval Latin” and I thought “what the hell: I’ll give it a try.” So, “Montana Redhead” (everybody on H2G2 was pretty much required to use a pseudonym) needed some help with translating a little bit of Medieval Latin as a part of her research for her PhD thesis. “Send me a copy” I typed.

I was expecting a few lines of an inscription or something.

I got a pdf of a handbook written by inquisitors for new inquisitors being posted in the area of Toulouse and Carcassonne in the south of France in the last half of the 13th Century (and three Papal Letters of Instruction for inquisitors). The text “Montana Redhead” sent me was from a 1717 edition of various Latin texts which I will likely never see.

I spent the next six months translating the thing. I would take my daughter to school in the morning, work on the “Doctrina” until about noon, and then carry on with life. For six months pretty much every weekday morning was spent translating this thing. When one is trained only in Classical Latin, Medieval Latin is quite a jump. I often found my years of public school French and my smattering of Italian to be of more use than anything I had learned at Virgil’s knee. I would dutifully send off installments to “Montana Redhead” and, when she achieved success with her PhD, I was honoured with an acknowledgment in the front pages of her thesis. I truly, truly feel honoured to have been given that opportunity. Thank you for the honour Melissa (Montana Redhead).

Some years later my neighbour suggested “You’re writing all this stuff anyway: why don’t you put it up on Amazon? You might as well see if you can get something for it!” At first it seemed to me a silly idea. But then I got thinking about those six months of mornings spent slaving over one of the most obscure languages there can possible be. So I got down to brass tacks and very, very carefully retranslated the whole thing and the three Papal Letters. Then I retyped all of the Latin text from the terribly fine italic print of that original pdf file. When I’d done all that and had a bit of a text actually assembled, I jumped on the learning curve of Kindle Direct Publishing (which turned out to be pretty user friendly) and put together my first book since my own thesis back in 1984. I gave it a title similar in length to the titles of many of my little paintings: The Doctrine of the Method of Proceeding Against Heretics: A Handbook for Inquisitors of Heretical Depravities such as those of the Albigensians and Waldensians.

It’s always a wonderful pleasure when someone, somewhere, buys a copy of this little 102 page handbook, not just because I get a few dollars deposited in my bank account, but because this handbook was composed and compiled by individuals who were clearly very different from our usual view of the Inquisition. These men (they were surely men) had come to search for heretics in a land cleansed of heretics half a century before they arrived and they were writing a handbook for men who would come after them. They knew that the only people left to prosecute were the poverty stricken, the ignorant, and — will this ever change? — the few Jews who continued to quietly practice their religion while publicly acting as Christians. Despite its title (my title is a translation of the Latin title in the 1717 edition), the handbook strikes me as more of a guidebook for defense counselors than a handbook for persecuting inquisitors. This sort of text from the Middle Ages is a text that needs to be available to scholars and historians and, frankly, to the general public, to counter the all-too-easy condemnation of everything about the Church in the Middle Ages. For all of the horrors — and they are overwhelming — the Middle Ages, and the Church, produced uncountable beautiful, moving, uplifting expressions of fundamental humanity. While there is little beauty in it, and while it is necessarily bound and confined in the shackles of the inquisitorial system, I came away from the Doctrina with a powerful impression that these men were trying desperately to be fair, to be compassionate, to care in a world that was incomprehensibly more harsh than most of us can imagine today.

When I look around at the world today, particularly the online world, I can’t help but feel it’s all become so much more harsh than it was in those early days of Hootoo. Back then the real world was harsh and Hootoo was a place where people could, for the most part, feel safe to express themselves and maybe find a receptive ear. Sometimes there were moments of bullying and really uncalled for nastiness, but it seemed like Real Life leaking in. Today it seems too often like the online world is the wellspring of harshness that has gushed out to drown Real Life with its bile.

I wonder if Toulouse in the late 13th Century might not have felt in some ways the same: so much terrible, lethal harshness, in real life — the only life at that time — and so much of it from the Church. I wonder whether maybe the writers and compliers of the Doctrina might have said somewhere inside themselves “Let’s cut them a little slack, for Christ’s sake! Sure, we’ve got to follow the law, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt. Maybe we could try to presume them innocent until proven guilty or something like that.” Throughout my work on the Doctrina I felt like I was reading a foundational document of the Rule of Law. And how startling to the modern mind is the suggestion that an inquisitorial document from the Medieval Catholic Church is a foundational document of the Rule of Law?

Well, I was startled, and I’m grateful that I was. I was startled to realize that this handbook — of which I had only learned because another human being had asked strangers for help — was the creation of human beings long ago and far away who couldn’t help wanting to help strangers themselves.

But none of that should really be startling: human beings generally do want to help strangers, thank goodness. That fact is the not-harsh-reality of Real Life . . .

. . . if we are willing to see that reality through the horrible fog we are all too willing these online days to throw up around us to block out everyone who doesn’t think just like us . . . .

If you’re a Medievalist, a Legal or other sort of Historian, a Monty Python fan, or just a Human Being, you might be interested in The Doctrine of the Method of Proceeding Against Heretics.

On Treasures Tucked into Old Books

Since I was an undergraduate I have frequented used bookstores whenever possible.  My regular pilgrimage site in those early days was Bjarne’s Books, a little place upstairs on the corner of Whyte Avenue and 100th Street in Edmonton.  Many of my early treasures were purchased from Bjarne before he packed up and moved to Vancouver, where he still, a scarce-to-be-imagined forty years later he continues to run a tremendous antiquarian book business under his full name, Bjarne Tokerud Bookseller, Inc.  I don’t expect Bjarne would remember me:  I was just a non-descript young university student with an affinity for old copies of Milton, Dante, and, particularly, for early editions of Old English poetry.

While it is always a joy to come across the unexpected in a second-hand bookstore — like that time I found a copy of Klaeber’s edition of Beowulf in the Wee Book Inn priced at $1.00!  It must have been the mid 80s.  I was going to see a film at the Princess and had already bought my ticket, I think, and, having arrived early, I was killing some time across the street from the theatre when my eyes fell on the volume in question.  $1.00!  I knew that at the time a brand new copy of this standard edition of the Old English poem would cost at least $60.00, a pretty major sum of money for those days.  I grabbed the book with one hand and dug in my pocket with the other, fumbling out change to the amount of $1.00 (no GST in those days) and shuffled out of the store amazed at my good fortune.

It was a different time.

Sometime earlier, probably at Bjarne’s, in 1983, I purchased a copy of Wyatt’s edition of Beowulf, the new edition by R. W. Chambers, published by Cambridge in 1925.  At some point the volume had belonged, according to the inscription on the fly leaf, to one Henry Hughes, in 1929.  I don’t know who Henry Hughes was, but he (I presume it was him) made copious crib notes through the first 1650 lines of the poem — past the half way point!  Well done, and far better than most who crack the cover of Beowulf, even in translation!

Something even more exciting to me than the serendipitous discovery of a book in a second-hand shop is the serendipitous discovery of some slip of paper, a note, a treasure tucked into the pages of a second-hand book.  I think I have written about this in the case of a volume of the Paston Letters.  Well, in Henry Hughes’ copy of Beowulf there is a slip of paper, about 4.5 inches by 6.5 inches, covered on both sides by very legible but apparently quickly written prose in blue ink from a fountain pen.  Here is a transcription of the note:

Hannibal leaving the senate house ordered Decius Magius to be arrested and tried He since (superscript: when) he said (superscript: was saying) this to be impossible by the law of treaty then fetters were thrown upon him and he was ordered to be led into camp before the lector As long as he was lead with uncovered head he marched(?) along as if addressing a meeting crying aloud to the assembled hostile(?) crowds on all sides, ” You have the liberty Campaneans which you sought. I am seyed in the midst of the forum in your sight inferior to none of the Campanians and carried away to death if Capua were seized what more violent deeds may (over crossed out “had”) been done. Go to meet Hannibal, adorn the city and make sacred the day of his approach / so that you may see his triumph over your fellow citizen. When the mob seemed (crossed out “by”)to be aroused by the man shouting these things his head was muffled and he was ordered to be borne outside the gate more swiftly So he is borne into camp and immediately placed in a ship and sent to Carthage A storm delayed the ship at Cyrene. There Magius being carried by a guard to Ptolemaeus When he had shown him that he had been captured by Hannibal contrary to the oath of treaty he was freed from prison.

Obviously this text has nothing to do with Beowulf.  What it actual appears to be is a student translation of an assigned Latin text.  The text translated is quite clearly an adaptation of Livy’s History of Rome, Book 23, perhaps Livy: The Hannibalian War: selections from books XXIII and XXIV, edited by E P Coleridge, in the Macmillan Elementary Classics series from the early part of the last century, a copy of which I have been unable to compare to the translation in question.

While having nothing really to do with Beowulf, this almost-century-old student translation of an adapted edition of a Latin Historian found tucked into an old edition of Beowulf has to do with me is that I was once an undergraduate learning Old English at the same time I was learning Latin, reading Beowulf for the first time in the same moment that I was reading Virgil for the first time.  This translation of Livy tucked into a crib-noted copy of Beowulf is exactly the sort of thing I might have tucked into the remnants of my own undergraduate library, and someday, some quirky collector of old books may find just such a trace of my learning, the spoor of my bookish questing, tucked into a volume formerly my own, into an object which once formed a part of my being,  in a second-hand book store.

Henry Hughes and I have each stood in the same place, between Latin and Old English,  and yet we’ve never met.  But still, I feel we actually have met somehow . . .  in this forgotten leaf of paper covered with Livy’s words, tucked into a copy of Beowulf, a poem and an historian virtually no one could read today even if they wanted to.

And someone in 2053, or 2073 will bring one of my old books home from a second-hand bookshop and find a slip of paper in it, and be curious, and take some time with it, and that person and Henry Hughes and I will for a moment transcend the time between and stand together with the treasures tucked into old books.