Repression and Power

Since the debates between Protestant and Catholic thinkers and historians in the 16th and 17th centuries, the right to plurality vs. the right to coercion in religious matters has been a contentious issue in the historiography of Christianity. Discussions on religious tolerance were further developed in the era of the Enlightenment, and continue to arise – with more or less significant variations – in 20th-century scholarship. This paper investigates the major contributions of 20th-century theoretical thought on the repression of heresy in medieval Europe and offers an analytical overview of the state of research. Its ambition, however, is not only to introduce relevant scholarship but also classify it and identify the deeper underlying tendencies and legacies in the layers of sedimentary knowledge on heresy and its repression.

Parergon, 2015

A structured and partly annotated bibliography of religious non-conformism / dissent / heresy / heterodoxy and its repression in the history of Christianity (now around 750 standard pages) intended to update and supplement, among others, Grundmann, Herbert, Bibliographie zur Ketzergeschichte des Mittelalters (1900-1966), Rome 1967, and Berkhout, Carl T. – Russell, Jeffrey Burton, Medieval Heresies: A Bibliography 1960-1979, Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies 1981. All headings are now also in English; some annotations are in Czech.

Speculum, 2012

International Journal of Religious Freedom, 2014

The aim of this article is to analyse how the developments in the post-apostolic church, and particularly after the Constantinian shift, soon resulted in the loss of religious freedom. In recent years, there has been a great deal of interest in mission in the changing contexts of post-Christian societies in the West. Yet most of this research has neglected to examine the relationship between the post-Christendom shift and the previous shift from the persecuted primitive church to the religious political construct of Christendom. What is more, an examination of the Christendom era contributes to the study of the conditions of religious freedom and persecution.The compulsion to religious uniformity and monopoly resulted inevitably in the loss of religious freedom over many centuries. In the final analysis, the differing assessments of Constantinianism depend on the respective eschatological and ecclesiological view.

É. Fournier and W. Mayer (ed.), Heirs of Roman Persecution: Studies on a Christian and para-Christian Discourse in Late Antiquity (London and New York: Routledge, 2019), 2019

2010