The struggle over fundamental issues erupted with great fury in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In this book, preeminent medievalist Heinrich Fichtenau turns his attention to a new attitude that emerged in Western Europe around the year 1000. This new attitude was exhibited both in the rise of heresy in the general population and in the self-confident rationality of the nascent schools. With his characteristic learning and insight, Fichtenau shows how these two separate intellectual phenomena contributed to a medieval world that was never quite as uniform as might appear from our modern perspective. 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.