The Heretic: Contingent and Commodified

Summary

EACH HERETIC WAS someone's neighbour, well-known and familiar but suspected of a crime that seemed to put everything in doubt. A bishop's court heard how, in 1413

John Anneys, the tailor, a follower as it is said of William the lollard, held and affirmed in public—especially in taverns—and preached in other public places that he would not confess fully and honestly to any priest, although he would rather not confess at all, and that all doctors and bishops of the church were stupid and were widely thought to be stupid; he is publicly held to be a lollard.

A neighbour is accused, the tailor who made your clothes; there is an allusion to the crime of heresy, which is not named; a known dissenting preacher—William—is labelled “lollard,” the vernacular English word that was sometimes a synonym for heretic, sometimes not; familiar places are namelessly evoked; reported speech blurs into opinion. Beneath the realistic detail and offhand banality of heresy records such as this, a curious indeterminacy seeps out. What is really being said, in language and in law? What was happening to John the tailor? Why is a heretic not called a heretic? Why does it feel as though something is being held back? What was the evidence for his crime?

The proceedings against John Anneys were in many ways typical of those experienced by thousands of men and women across Europe between 1100 and 1500. They were men and women who found that their words and thoughts made them suspect of a crime. It is interesting, therefore, that the study of heresy and the study of crime have come to form two distinct bodies of scholarship. Some level of understanding is lost if we perpetuate that historiographical separation. I begin this chapter, therefore, by comparing the ways in which heresy and other crimes were defined. My aim is to draw attention to two features common to the definition of all crimes, but which affected the people called heretics to an extraordinary degree. The first is that being a criminal does not simply arise from acting in a certain way: it is contingent upon an act being labelled criminal in a particular time and place. Over time, and around the world, definitions of crime vary, and being “a criminal” is dependent upon this.