The heresy of the Free Spirit is often considered to have been the most important continental European heresy of the fourteenth century. Many historians have described its membership as a league of anarchist deviants who fomented sexual license and subversion of authority. Free spirits are supposed to have justified nihilism and megalomania and to have been remote precursors of Bakunin and Nietzsche and twentieth century bohemians and hippies. This volume examines the Free Spirit movement as it appeared in its own age, and concludes that it was not a tightly-organized sect but rather a spectrum of belief that emphasized voluntary poverty and quietistic mysticism. Overall, the movement was far more typical of the late-medieval search for God and godliness than is commonly supposed.

Contents
Acknowledgements
Abbreviations
Introduction
Heresy and Fornication
1 Three Racy Stories
2 The Heresy in the Swabian Ries
3 Heresy and Fornication: a Topos of the Thirteenth Century
4 Adamites and Luciferans in the Fourteenth Centruy
Beghards and Beguines
1 Origins and Sources of Hostility
2 The Heresy of Lay Piety
3 Conrad of Megenberg and John Wasmod of Homburg
The Condemnation
1 The Thirteenth Century
2 The German Decrees
3 Marguerite Porete
4 The Council of Vienne
The Inquisition in Strassburg
1 The Campaign of John of Zürich
2 The Second Wave of Persecutions
3 The Case of John Malkaw
4 The Third Wave of Persecutions
The Inquisition in the East
1 John and Albert of Brünne
2 The Beguines of Schweidnitz
3 The Hussite Problem
The Inquisition in the West
1 Hermann Kuchener and Constantine of Erfurt
2 The Revival of the Papal Inquisition
3 The Campaign of Walter Kerlinger: John Hartmann and the Beguines of Thuringia
4 Conrad Kannler
5 The Campaigns of Martin of Prague, Peter Zwicker, and Eylard Schoenveld
6 Nicholas of Basel and the Campaign of John Mulberg
7 The "Men of Intelligence"
The Fifteenth Century
1 The Polemics of Gerson
2 The Era of the Council of Basel
3 Hans Becker
The Predicament of the Mystics
1 Meister Eckhart
2 Eckhart's Orthodox Followers
3 Ruysbroeck
4 Groote and the Brethren of the Common Life
The Literature of the Free Spirit
1 The Mirror of Simple Souls
2 The Pseudo-Eckhart Literature
3 De onbekende leek and Schwester Katrei
4 The Rhineland libelli and The Book of Spiritual Poverty
5 Conclusions
The Place of the Heresy of the Free Spirit in Social and Cultural History
1 Who Were the Free Spirits?
2 Motivation
3 "The Pursuit of the Millennium" or "Beyond Good and Evil"?
4 The Lay Spirit and the Dignity of Man
5 Ultimate Failure
List of manuscripts
Index