Book Review

Europe: Ancient and Medieval

In 1184, Pope Lucius III condemned a group called the Humiliati or "humble ones" as heretics. Unlike the Cathars, whom he also condemned, the Humiliati posed no challenge to Christian dogma. What was at issue was the Humiliati's method of living out the tenets of the Christian faith. In 1201, Pope Innocent III revisited the question of the Humiliati, approving a framework that allowed for three separate Humiliati orders: canons, regulars, and laity. It is the latter event rather than the former that Frances Andrews emphasizes in her excellent new study of the Humiliati, which maintains that the group has been too long tarred with the brush of scandal, when instead they should be regarded as primary actors on the stage of the evangelical reawakening of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Herbert Grundmann first made this argument in 1935 in his ground-breaking Religious Movements of the Middle Ages (English translation, 1995), which argued that both heterodox and orthodox religious groups of the twelfth century shared a common impulse toward the vita apostolica, a life centered on preaching and evangelical poverty. In Grundmann's analysis, the Humiliati played an important but rather limited role in the religious revival. By contrast, Andrews has thrown the spotlight on the Humiliati, a welcome accomplishment, as there has been no full-length treatment of the subject since 1911, when Luigi Zanoni published his account that focused on the group's involvement with the wool manufacturing industry.	1
This is not to say, however, that studies of the Humiliati have been lacking, as Andrews's dexterous historiographical discussion in chapter one demonstrates. English-speaking audiences were first introduced to the Humiliati in the 1970s by Brenda Bolton, whose interest in Innocent III led her to investigate the pope's relationship with the movement from an ecclesiastical standpoint. Alternatively, Italian scholars have long been mining the rich holdings of Italy's archives in an attempt to reconstruct Humiliati communities. Andrews is extremely well versed in this literature; indeed, she has incorporated the findings of many of these local studies into her own work, which itself is grounded in scrupulous archival research based mainly, but not exclusively, in Verona. What she has given us, then, is a three-fold contribution to the field: first, she has performed an invaluable service for English-language audiences by presenting and synthesizing the results of an enormous amount of recent Italian scholarship; second, her work adds new and exciting original research to the field, much of it challenging our standard view of the Humiliati; and third, it is the first study to trace out the general contours and development of the Humiliati from the early movement of the 1170s to its apogee as an established religious order in the mid-thirteenth century. Any one of these elements would have been an achievement; the combination of all three results in major contributions to the fields of both medieval Italian history and ecclesiastical history of the Middle Ages.	2
Andrews's monograph is also a salutary lesson in historical method as her approach brings together documents of both theory and practice. That is, she sensibly tests prescriptive documents produced by the papal chancery against notarial documents of practice, a method that frequently reveals a world of difference between the well-ordered communities suggested by the papal records and the actual "reality on the ground." Wills, land transactions, and professions of faith transmit a much more complicated and fluid picture of the early Humiliati than the papal accounts would indicate. To take one example, the papal directives to the Humiliati seem to suggest that the three orders lived autonomously. Yet this patently was not always the case. Andrews finds ample evidence that the order's living arrangements were far from unambiguous: members of the first order cohabited with brothers and sisters of the second order, in some cases even with children that the Humiliati rule, Omnis boni principium, expressly forbade. Distinguishing a first order domus from a second order community therefore becomes virtually impossible; but more important, such an example highlights the tension between the messy lived experience of the order and the neat and artificial distinctions that papal documents suggest.	. . .