Orthodoxy and Controversy in Twelfth-Century Religious Discourse: Peter Lombard’s ‘Sentences’ and the Development of Theology by Clare Monagle (review)

Riding on the coat-tails of Robert Moore's idea of the first European revolution, Clare Monagle drives home the important observation that medieval clerics were embedded in the cornerstone of that cultural epoch. They were the engines that produced a new world order. Crucially important was theology, that quarrelsome old woman (to borrow a phrase from Erasmus), which received a specific and striking endorsement at the Fourth Lateran Council that approved Peter Lombard. This often overlooked event constituted a watershed in the recognition of academic theology as an indispensable factor within the medieval world. The correlation between theology and heresy in the Middle Ages was alleviated to some extent when Lombard emerged from the shadows of heterodoxy into the light of official approbation. Suspicion did not vanish overnight and detractors remained convinced that Lombard's Sentences did threaten ecclesiastical identity. Not even the endorsement of an ecumenical council was sufficient to establish academic theology as essential to Christian faith and institutional power. The struggle that occupied the schoolmen for two centuries indelibly marked medieval Europe. The story Monagle elaborates is one of controversy around the reception of the Sentences and the acrimonious struggle for the freedom of theology.