How Heretics Talk, According to Bernard Gui and William Thorpe

Abstract

This chapter juxtaposes Bernard Gui’s accounts of heretic speech in his Inquisitor’s Handbook with William Thorpe’s personal narrative of his interview with Thomas Arundel, Archbishop of Canterbury. Gui’s thirteenth-century text is a surprisingly rich source for medieval linguistic and pragmatic ideas. His accounts of dialogues with suspected heretics reveal how pragmatic ideas and analysis informed the official Church’s view of heretics’ uses of equivocation, hedging, and recontextualization as strategies for evading examiners’ questions and establishing speaker agency. Thorpe’s early fifteenth-century narrative describes his use of similar discursive and conversational strategies to evade Arundel’s repeated calls that he affirm or disavow his heretical views.