LAUSR

In the short space of two years scholars working on both sides of the Atlantic erected an impressive triptych dedicated to the great Carolingian double predestination controversy. Matthew Gillis’s Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: The Case of Gottschalk of Orbais (2017) focussed on the Saxon monk whose writings and highly visible activities fuelled the controversy. Gillis’s panel is particularly important for including analysis of all Gottschalk’s extant writings. The other two panels, Warren Pezé’s massive book also published in 2017 and a collection of essays published the following year, avoid redundancy with Gillis’s book and with each other and contribute even more toward understanding the ‘multiplexity’ (Le virus de l’erreur, p. 216) of the age’s most searing and long-lasting controversy. In a book ofmany perspectives and theses, Pezé’s overarching theme was to free the double predestination controversy from its ‘hermetic segmentation’ (pp. 490–1), the legacy of a centuries-old historiographical tradition that dates medieval heresy only from the eleventh century and which sees in the ninth-century controversy only a debate among intellectual elites. His approach, as the title of his book announces, is an essay in social history which anchors the theological in the social and 1 Reviewed in these pages. See EME 27 (2019), pp. 600–2.