"Beware Greeks Bearing News" Intro

I am in the process of making the final revisions to my paper for the International Medieval Congress, a process I call "polishing the turd." Here is the introduction. This is a bit more abrupt than I typically am as a writer, but I only have twenty minutes to read this, which means no more than ten pages.

Alarmed at the heretics plaguing Périgord in the early decades of the eleventh century, a monk styling himself Héribert sounded the warning to the four corners of the Earth.

To all Christians in the Orient and the Occident, North and South, who believe in Christ, Peace and Mercy in God the Father, in his only son our Lord and in the Holy Ghost.

Hard upon this rallying cry there followed an indictment of the heretics who exhibited extreme austerity, refusing meat and wine, and genuflecting a hundred times per day. They took no money and practiced communalism. Charity was not accepted, since they denied one ought to own property. Consisting of clerks, priests, monks and nuns, to all appearances they were a pious group.

But behind this façade lurked more sinister transgressions. According to Héribert they would not enter a church, except to recruit new members to their sect. At the end of the Pater Noster, instead of the usual “Glory to the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit,” the heretics said, “for yours is the kingdom, you are rule all creatures forever and ever, amen.” They denied the worth of the Mass. The chant used during the service was said “to be vain and invented for the favor of men.” When they did enter the church, always in the cause of seducing converts, they would not chant the canon or take communion. Two strategies were used to avoid taking communion: the heretics either skirted the altar or, if they were unable to turn away, spit the Host into the missal. The heretics also refused to adore the Cross and the crucified Lord. Those worshiping it were to be pitied, and were compared to the worshipers of idols in the book of Psalms.

Recent scholarship using the “Letter of Héribert” along with the sermons of Adémar of Chabannes has done much to revive the notion that the heretics of eleventh-century France were proselytized by Bogomil missionaries from the Byzantine Empire. This scholarship has pointed toward superficial similarities between the western heretics described and the dualist Bogomils, and toward the language used in polemics against the new religious movements as evidence of their connection. I intend to propose that these similarities cannot necessarily be taken as prima facie evidence of such a connection. They may, rather, constitute evidence of a different kind of influence—that of visiting Orthodox monks on the reporting of dissident movements by their Catholic brethren, who saw superficial similarities between the very real threat of Bogomilism in the East and the nascent reformist movements which sought a return to the life of the primitive Church in the West.