Matthew Gillis, “Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais” (Oxford UP, 2017)

In Conversation: An OUP Podcast · Jul 26, 2017 · 47m

In the popular imagination, heresy belongs to the Christian Middle Ages in much the way that the Crusades or courtly culture do. Non-specialists in the medieval field may assume that the problem of heresy always existed, uniformly, throughout the period. But as Matthew Gillis shows in Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (Oxford University Press, 2017), in the age of Charlemagne and his descendants, heretics were largely “seen as either distant foreign dangers or the legendary villains of ancient church lore.” That is, until around 840 CE, when one…