Page:Illustrations of the history of medieval thought and learning.djvu/103

Rh false. The judgement, we may be sure, was the more exemplary on account of their previous favour in high places. The persons whose intimacy with the arraigned canons might seem to commit them too deeply to their errors, attested their own innocence by the savage joy with which they heard the sentence,—the queen, according to one account, plucked out the eye of her old confessor as he passed from the hall;—and thirteen of the number, two others recanting, perished at the stake.

The Acts of the synod of Orleans suggest no clue as to the origin of this sect. Among contemporaries of Chabannais alone describes it as Manichean. He traces it to the teaching of a certain Rusticus—or was he only a rustic?—of Périgord. Rodulph Glaber, on the contrary, says it was imported by a woman from Italy Both these writers, however, betray too plainly their ignorance of the characteristics and motives of the heretics for us to be at liberty to accept their testimony without corroboration. If we examine the indictment against them, we find a variety of articles shewing kinship with the Paulician beliefs. They denied, it was alleged, all the facts of the human life of Christ, the miracles of his birth, his passion, and his resurrection; all miracles, they said, were madness, deliramenta. They assailed doctrines not less closely bound up with the life of the church, the regenerating virtue of baptism, and the presence of the body and blood of the Saviour in the eucharistic species; they denounced the vanity of invoking saints, the superfluity of the Christian works of piety. Rodulph adds that they held the universe to be eternal and without author, and if the specification be true it would place the canons of Orleans in a position by themselves; but the tenet is little in keeping with