One outcome of both the papal reform movement and the growth of urban society was the rise of popular religious movements. Many of the men and women who preached to ordinary people were declared heretics either because they criticized the excesses of the church or because they claimed the right to preach in public even though they were not priests (preaching required a license from the local bishop). Women were prominent in these movements. But hostile churchmen also liked to link religious insubordination and subversive persuasion with sexual license.
These four passages, all written by (relatively) hostile churchmen, were taken from Walter L. Wakefield and Austin P. Evans, trans., Heresies of the High Middle Ages (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), 109, 110, 209.
1. On the heretic Tanchelm, in the Low Countries, c.1112-1114
Now, indeed, holy Father, give ear to our cries of distress and be alert to the precursor of the antichrist who now traces the very path, in exactly the course that the Antichrist will follow. First in the coastal provinces Tanchelm injected the venom of his wickedness into an untutored people of weak faith. Gradually he began to spread his errors by way of matrons and harlots whose intimacies, confidential conversation, and private couch he was most willing to enjoy. Through them he also entangled the husbands in the snares of his iniquity. Afterwards he no longer preached in hidden places and in bedrooms but upon the rooftops and delivered his sermons in the open fields to a multitude thronging about him on all sides.
2. The heresiarch Henry, in Le Mans, 1115:
Matrons and adolescent boys (for he enjoyed the pandering of both sexes), attending him at different times, avowed openly their aberrations and increased them, caressing his feet, his buttocks, his groin, with tender hands ... By his speech even a heart of stone could be moved to repentance; monks, anchorites, and all the cloistered clergy could well imitate his piety and celibate life. Indeed, they declared, the Lord God had bestowed upon him the ancient and veritable blessing and spirit of the prophets ... Furthermore, when he addressed the people, these clerics sat weeping at his feet as he roared pronouncements like an oracle. It was as if legions of demons were all making their noise in one blast through his mouth. Nevertheless, he was remarkably fluent. When his speech entered the ears of the mob, it stuck in their minds. Like a potent poison, it penetrated to the inner organs, vented an inexorable hatred of life ...
3. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux inveighs against heretics in Cologne:
Women are leaving their husbands, men are putting aside their wives, and they all flock to their heretics! Clerics and priests, the youthful and the adult among them, are leaving their congregations and churches and are often found int he company of weavers of both sexes. Is that not serious damage? Is not this the work of foxes?
4. On Peter Waldes, founder of the Waldensian heretical movement, c.1173
There was in the city of Lyons a rich man named Waldes, who was not well educated, but on hearing the Gospels was anxious to learn more precisely what was in them. He made a contract with two priests, the one to translate them into the vernacular and the other to write them down at his dictation ... [He then] resolved to devote himself to evangelical perfection, just as the apostles had pursued it. Selling all his possessions, in contempt of the world he gave his money to the poor and presumptiously arrogated to himself the office of the apostles [ie., he did this without license, education, and/or training]. Preaching in the streets and the broadways the Gospels and those things that he had learned by heart, he drew to himself many men and women that they might do the same, and he strengthened them in the Gospel. He also sent out persons even of the basest occupations to preach in the nearby villages. Men and women alike, stupid and uneducated, they wandered through the villages, entered homes, preached in the squares and even in the churches, and induced other to do likewise. This seemed reprehensible in respect of them, that men and women traveled the road together, often lodged together.