The High Medieval Era · 13th-14th c. · Rhineland, Low Countries
'Free Spirit' Heresy
Disputed history
What's actually known about this group is genuinely disputed among historians.
About This Movement
In the early fourteenth century the church declared that a sect existed. The decree Ad nostrum, issued at the Council of Vienne in 1312, listed eight errors said to be held by a 'sect of the Free Spirit'. Chiefly that a soul perfected in this life becomes incapable of sin and needs neither the church nor the virtues any longer. Interrogators then went looking for people who held them, and found them, because the questions supplied the answers. Modern research, above all Robert Lerner's study of 1972, concluded that no organized sect of this kind ever existed. What existed was a wide spectrum of mystical piety, much of it among beguines and beghards, and a charge that could be laid against any part of it. The movement named here probably was not real; the charge and its victims certainly were.
Sources
- Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls (trans. Ellen Babinsky, Classics of Western Spirituality, 1993) (primary) — The one substantial text by a person condemned under what became the Free Spirit charge; she never claims the label, and whether the Mirror teaches what Ad nostrum condemned is precisely the question. The overlap with Beguine history is real: the suppression of beguines used this same charge.
- The trial of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart (Paris, 1310), trans. in Sean L. Field, The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor (Notre Dame, 2012) (primary) — The inquisitorial process records that made her the emblematic case for the charge - documents from the persecuting side, not a neutral account.
- Ad nostrum, Council of Vienne (1312), trans. in Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (1990) (primary) — The eight-error decree that legally defined 'the sect of the Free Spirit'; its errors were partly extracted, and distorted, from Porete's Mirror.
- Interrogation records of accused beghards and beguines (e.g. John of Brunn; the Schweidnitz interrogations, 1332) (primary) — The 'movement' as it survives in the record: answers shaped by the questioners' own template. Partial translations exist, including in Lerner's own apparatus.
- Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (California, 1972) (secondary) — The consensus-setting study: no organized sect ever existed - a persecutors' construct laid over a wide spectrum of mystical piety.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 12 'Christians and heretics' (Biller); cf. ch. 19 'Mysticism and transcendence' (Hollywood) (reference)