Medieval heresy

A textbook doing a good job of covering such a broad topic over a broad timescale would be far too big for this job this one tries to do: briefly cover the major heretical movements from the 11th to the 16th centuries.

Although aimed at students, this book sadly doesn't put the various heretical movements into much social and political context. I was disheartened to see that events that would have had major impacts on the flourishing or repression of heresies, such as the Great Schism, barely even get a mention. The final chapters, although not the direct focus of the book, assume a prior knowledge of the events and key players of the Reformation. In conjunction with other readings I'm assuming this textbook will get me through my class, but on its own it doesn't do enough with the space it's given.

On a more nit-picky note, the language used in this book was really difficult to wade through. Obviously of its time (the first edition was published in 1977), the contents may have been updated in the 2002 edition but the language hasn't. I had to read the majority of it aloud so the run-on sentences would actually make sense, as they were going nowhere in my head, and Lambert is liberal with his use of foreign phrases and archaic words in the place of a more simple (and direct) English phrasing. Obviously, I have the ability to Google them, but surely English in an English-language book makes sense? My favourite was the repeated use of ‘quondom', when ‘former' would not only not affect the word count, but contains fewer letters. And don't even get me started on all the extraneous commas.

If you've been assigned this book for class, IMO it's worth your time. The specifics on the major heresies (Waldensianism, Catharism, Hussitism) are quite thorough. Just remember that you need to look elsewhere to give it all some context.