Fichtenau's panoramic survey opens with the new heretics with popular appeal in the early eleventh century and ends with the new heretics with scholarly appeal in the late twelfth. He presents the whole spectrum of lay men and women, schoolmen, and members of religious orders who labored to delve into the most basic questions of reality with passion and conviction. While he recognizes some fundamental conditions underpinning the rise both of heretical movements -- particularly the Cathars -- as well as Scholastics, he is careful to distinguish the fundamental differences among these groups. Central to these differences is how myth and textuality played a role in their beliefs, what tools they developed to analyze the language of myth (religious or philosophical), and why their speculations were allied with doubt about the mysteries inherent to medieval Christian faith.

First published in German in 1991, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages continues a grand tradition of scholarship on the intellectual history of the Middle Ages.