Late Medieval Heresy: New Perspectives. Studies in Honor of Robert E. Lerner, ed. Michael D. Bailey and Sean L. Field. Heresy and Inquisition in the Middle Ages Series. Woodbridge, Suffolk: York Medieval Press and Boydell & Brewer, 2018, xiii, 267 pp.

This highly readable Festschrift provides new insights into “the staggering variety of things a person could believe or do” in order to be persecuted as a heretic in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Western Europe, as noted by Barbara Newman (248). The author-editors chose to focus this wide-ranging volume on relatively neglected figures, largely passing over the well-cultivated field of Wycliffe and the Hussites (4–5). Contributors have honored Professor Lerner’s example by their choice of a focused theme for the collection (11): the emphasis on manuscript sources (9–13), and a recognition of historiography as inevitably entwined with contemporary issues (vii, 11).