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be elicited by a holistic interrogation of the substantial Northumbrian additions. After a general introduction to the history, nature, and setting of the community at Chester-le-Street (chapter 1), Jolly provides a detailed reassessment of Aldred and his two colophons (chapter 2) and then a thorough examination of all the later scribes represented in A.IV.19 and their interrelationships (chapter 3). The implications of the nature of the scribal work and of the textual content for both the devotional (chapter 4) and the intellectual (chapter 5) life of the community at Chester-le-Street are then explored. Finally, chapter 6 teases out the inferences that may be drawn from this material about the communitys pedagogy, learning, and spirituality more generally. Appended to and underpinning the analysis are detailed tables of the structure and content of the manuscript, plus editions of the material in the quires that were added at Chester-le-Street (pp. 217359). Jollys investigation of the codicology is meticulous, her analysis of the texts sensitive, and her assessment of the quality and purpose of the work sympathetic: she reasonably takes a very favorable view of Aldreds abilities and contributions in particular. If her discussion of the physical structure of the additions is occasionally difficult to follow (even for a reader who knows the manuscript fairly well), her analysis of the gloss is pellucid (a welcome contrast to the dense articles by A. S. C. Ross that have until recently dominated the bibliography on the subject). Equally, even if more could perhaps have been made of the other manuscripts that are known to have been at Chester-le-Street in the tenth century, the decision to focus on the additions to this one book is wholly defensible, not least in view of their status as uniquely important witnesses to Northumbrian culture from a period that is otherwise dominated by manuscripts produced in southern England. Balancing rigorous analysis of the evidence of the additions with a realistic attempt to empathize with the aims and assumptions of those who produced them, Jollys insightful study shows how part of a single key manuscript can indeed be a window through which to perceive the beliefs, culture, and observances of a distant community and its relationship to a wider world. Durham University RICHARD GAMESON

The War on Heresy. By R. I. Moore. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2012. Pp. xvi, 378. $35.00. ISBN 978-0-674-06582-6.) This is an important book, and one that will generate much debate. In the last twenty years the study of medieval heresy in Western Europe has evolved radically. Historians have reread the sources with a more critical eye, with a greater sensitivity to the concerns, goals, and preconceptions of the authors of these texts, and with greater attention to their interrelationships.The result has been a dramatic questioning of most of our standard understanding of the subject.The results of this research, however, have remained in the pages of specialist monographs and journal articles. R. I. Moore, whose work has done

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much to spur this reconsideration, has in this volume produced the first synthetic overview of heresy that is thoroughly steeped in this new scholarship. Moores subject is not so much heresy in and of itself. Indeed, he is very skeptical that heresy, in the sense of organized groups that consciously challenged commonly received doctrines of the Catholic faith, actually existed. Instead, the real subject of the book is the process by which the leaders, lay and clerical, of Western Europe came to believe that heresy, both organized and doctrinally coherent, existed and constituted a major threat to the wellbeing of society. For Moore, heresy is something that was very much constructed in the eyes of those who sought to repress it. In his interpretation the religious life of Europe in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries was characterized by a great variety of spiritual currents. Many of these were expressions of the traditional Christianity of small-scale peasant communities. Others reflected the complex reforming currents of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. It was the only the process of the labeling of some of these by church authorities that made them heretical. For Moore, the war on heresy, which began in earnest in the twelfth century, was part of a revolution from above.The construction of the notion that the Christian church was beset by a widespread, unified, and organized challenge, together with the mobilization of means to repress it, was part of the ruling elites efforts to subordinate local societies to centralized governmental institutions and elite cultural norms.To wage this disciplinary offensive the ruling strata devised a variety of mechanisms, two of which Moore sees as key. One was the juridical technique of inquisition, which had a formidable capacity to break down the instinctive resistance of small communities to the demands of outsiders.The other was the fashioning of a set of discourses that could readily provide a basis for demonizing the defence of local customs or the expression of particular grievances as manifestations of universal conspiracies that menaced human society and divine order (p. 329). This is a persuasive, and attractive, argument. It has, however, one great stumbling block: the set of practices and beliefs called by historians, rather unhelpfully, Catharism. If any of the religious movements of the Middle Ages can be classified as heretical, then certainly it was this one, with its dualist theology of two gods, one evil and one good, and its counter-church organization, complete with bishops, deacons, and sacraments. Moore endorses the position, most zealously advanced by Mark Pegg, that Catharism is, and was, largely a myth of the inquisitors and modern historians. Moore has many interesting things to say on this problem, but some readers may think that the effort to deconstruct this particular heresy has gone too far. The War on Heresy is one of the most stimulating books on the subject of heresy to be published in the last few decades. Its readers may not be con-

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vinced by every aspect of Moores argument, but they will agree that he has succeeded in demonstrating that the struggle against heresy, whether reality or chimaera, played a central role in shaping European civilization. University of California, Irvine JAMES GIVEN

Pope Urban IIs Council of Piacenza: March 17, 1095. By Robert Somerville. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2011. Pp. viii, 151. $110.00. ISBN 978-0-19-925859-8.) Robert Somerville began his scholarly career with a study of Pope Urban IIs game-changing council at Clermont in November 1095. Since that first study, Urban has never been far from his thoughts. He has published an extraordinarily thorough study of Urbans Council of Melfi that took place in 1089 (New York, 1996) and has now published an equally splendid study of Urbans council on Italian soil in spring 1095 that preceded his journey to Clermont. The canons promulgated by the councils of the Latin Church until the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 present varied and always difficult problems. For reasons that no one has yet explained and probably never will, the conciliar canons were not preserved and circulated in a papally approved and authenticated document.As Somerville has written in this and earlier books, the canons were usuallybut not invariably, as far as we knowread out during the last session of the council. Was each canon delivered on an individual piece of parchment, or were all the canons written out on a single sheet? There is evidence for the first presumption that would explain why the transmission of the canons was so serendipitous. The participants did not have a neatly ordered set of canons to carry back home on a single page, but, if they were interested, a sheaf of canons that invited confusion, losses, and lack of uniformity. The question is further complicated by the content of the canons. At the end of his study, Somerville discusses Urbans last council in Rome in April 1099. The death of Adhmar of Le Puy, the papal legate in the Holy Land appointed by Urban to guide the crusade, raised great concerns about whether the crusade would be a success.The crusade became an issue for the council. Urban was a reformer, and he also wished to repeat his earlier reform canons that he had promulgated at Melfi and Piacenza. Somerville points out that Urban reissued canons 113 from Piacenza and 2, 3, 5, and 7 from Melfi again at Rome. One could imagine that the participants of those earlier councils would not have been interested in canons with which they were already familiar and would not have bothered to collect them.This repetition of previously issued canons at church councils was a common feature of conciliar work until the thirteenth century.