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John H. Arnold, Persecution and Power in Medieval Europe: The Formation of a Persecuting Society, by R. I. Moore, The American Historical Review, Volume 123, Issue 1, February 2018, Pages 165–174, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/123.1.165
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Abstract
This reappraisal of The Formation of a Persecuting Society (1987) argues that R. I. Moore’s book fundamentally reshaped how medievalists think about the repression of heresy and of various “others” in medieval society. It notes also, however, that the book has often been misread as an exemplar of “Foucauldian gloom” and as representing medieval Christianity as a dominating, repressive authority. In fact Moore’s project was directed much more toward the courtly clerics involved in governance than “the Church” as such, and his project, inspired by the social theory of Mary Douglas and Max Weber, was to think about how persecution functioned socially and politically. Subsequent work on medieval heresy, leprosy, and the Jews has altered some of the landscape originally covered by Formation, but without obviating its core inquiry. But there are some key questions left unanswered by Moore’s original analysis, and it is argued that a more truly Foucauldian approach to medieval repression might now allow us to build a more variegated and complex picture.
