Before research on this thesis began the state of studies on German-speaking Waldensians was the following. Although there were many studies of particular fields or problems, there was one large lacuna; no-one had attempted to collate the data of trial records from widely dispersed areas and extract the picture of Waldensians given in the inquisitorial literature of the time in order to use these two - confirming, supplementing, or contradicting each other - as the basis for an overall view of the sect in German-speaking lands in the fourteenth century. Some large problems in the evidence to be used for such a survey had not been tackled. The most important of these was the sharp contrast between the account of the Waldensians given in inquisitorial literature of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, and the account of them given in the inquisitorial literature of the later fourteenth century: the earlier account shows them in a very radical position, totally rejecting the Church and its sacraments and constituting a counter-Church with its own hierarchy and administration of the Eucharist, while the later account shows them in a much less radical position, accepting much of the Church's sacramental ministration and claiming for themselves only the authority to preach and hear confessions. There were also the problems of contradictions between the accounts of them in inquisitorial literature and the data of more direct evidence (e.g. between the notion found in inquisitorial literature that the Waldensians held the Fathers to be in hell, and the real reverence for the Fathers to be found in Waldensian writings), and the discrepancies, sometimes wild, between some elements in the depositions of the Waldensians' adherents and the tenets of the Waldensian preachers themselves ... [see pdf file for full abstract]
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:482492 |
| Date | January 1974 |
| Creators | Biller, Peter |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:30a51631-e20f-4699-a21c-cf16e16ffcd5 |
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