R. I. Moore
Autor/a de Rand McNally Atlas of World History
Sobre l'autor
R. I. Moore has been Professor of Medieval History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne since 1993.
Obres de R. I. Moore
Obres associades
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society - Fifth Series, Volume 30 (1980) — Col·laborador, algunes edicions — 5 exemplars
Etiquetat
Coneixement comú
- Nom oficial
- Moore, Robert Ian
- Altres noms
- Moore, R. I.
- Data de naixement
- 1941
- Gènere
- male
- Nacionalitat
- UK
Membres
Ressenyes
Llistes
Premis
Potser també t'agrada
Autors associats
Estadístiques
- Obres
- 11
- També de
- 2
- Membres
- 1,060
- Popularitat
- #24,290
- Valoració
- 3.9
- Ressenyes
- 14
- ISBN
- 52
- Llengües
- 6
- Preferit
- 1
His argument is, in short, that the 'heretics' of the high middle ages were by and large people who pushed the church's own reformist principles a little too far. The Papacy wanted priests to be better educated, celibate, less corrupt, and less abusive... the 'heretics' were often just people who thought and believed this, but were on the wrong side of other conflicts. They weren't really heretics at all; the problem was that they stood in the way of, for instance, the French king's desire to centralize or bring what we now know as France under his power. Or, later, you could be labelled a heretic for defending traditional, local forms of religion against these universalizing reforms.
Moore discusses dozens of cases, and shows how all of the prosecutions or inquisitions of heresy were the result of many small events: political struggles, yes, but also the increasing use of clerics all educated to see centralized government as a good; the habit of tarring those who disagreed with you about strictly temporal matters as heretics; the very odd belief that 'disagreeing with the pope' was an instance of heresy, even when the pope's opinion was, roughly, "I want that land"... on and on.
The question of how many Cathars there were before the Albigensian Crusade, Moore suggests, is like the question how many witches there were in Europe before the witch-hunts: the persecuted peoples were more or less invented by the persecuted. Those who died did not die for their beliefs; they were not Luther and his 'here I stand.' They were just unfortunates caught up in political squabbles and massive sociological change, eliminated because they had land or wealth that others wanted. There's no moral about holding fast to your beliefs. The moral of the story is, as ever, those with the armor will win.
The downside to his attention to detail is that the book is more or less a mess. Far too many chapters, far, far too many sections, and too much repetition. At the sentence level, though, Moore writes very well.… (més)