A Persecuting Society
The Formation of a Persecuting Society: Authority and Deviance in Western Europe 950-1250
by R.I. Moore
The 2000 edition of this book, originally published in 1987, contains two chapters responding to earlier criticism and willingly accepts some corrections, in at least one case at the expense of an important argument. So this author is not opinionated and is careful about the claims made. Moore acknowledges that violence and persecution are pretty nearly universal, but his thesis is that in the Twelfth Century, the emerging nation states of Western Europe, and also the papacy, established persecution as a distinct feature of the way both secular and church authorities enforced central control at the expense of more traditional, community based power structures.
As an example, he notes that the practice of trial by ordeal might appear objective, but depended on the judgement of a group of community figures which could be very subjective indeed. In trial by water, they might find reasons to suggest that the suspect who sank (implying innocence) had floated long enough to be guilty. In the same way, trial by holding hot irons allowed curious debates about whether the hands were healing properly (innocent) or not (guilty). History insists that replacing trail by ordeal with trial by properly educated officials is a move to greater justice, a triumph of Reason over superstition, but as Moore also notes, their operating methods used Reason in ways that had as little to do with objectivity as the popular ordeals they replaced and there was conflict between the two types of judgement. He cites examples of communities who refused to allow their decisions to be overturned by bishops or lords, not out of zealotry towards heretics for example, but to prevent their traditional powers from being encroached upon by external authorities.
The persecuting authorities actively sought out targets for their exhibitions of power, if necessary by inventing them, or by taking a real but modest infringement and amplifying it into a major cause. In the 12th century, the three major categories were Jews, heretics and lepers. There was little if anything about their victims to account for the level of persecution and the inquisition process entailed devising a remarkably unpleasant caricature and then straining all reason to apply this to the subject. Typically this would include drawing on ancient sources, including the bible and the early church fathers, for authority, but as Moore observes, the answers they drew from these ancient authorities were entirely the product of their style of questioning. When the inquisitors sought to show that they were dealing with things predicted by the Book of Revelations, for example, they were starting out from that biblical source and then seeking evidence that could, with appropriate ingenuity, be made to fit.
In short, the trials and persecutions revealed little about their targets and a great deal about the persecutors. In later centuries, targets multiplied. Moore cites Scribener, who in a 1996 essay showed how in 16th Century Germany, beggars, gypsies, spendthrifts, discharged soldiers and others were made vulnerable by being classified as outsiders. And Moore notes that the modern state has acquired a capacity to persecute beyond the dreams of the most ambitious mediaeval ruler. (p154)
Moore points out that persecution has if anything increased and not reduced with the passage of time. He considers that it is used by centralizing authority as a means to displace devolved and popular institutions and to interfere directly in every aspect of daily life. The book is chilling partly for its account of the distant past, but more so because it is so directly relevant to our own times. [He does not give specific examples, but I wonder how helpful it might be to use Moore's model in discussing Stalin's purges or the McCarthy era moral panic of the USA in the Fifties, or more recent "wars" on drugs and on terror.]
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