History without humility: Reflections on Norman Cohn's historiography of horrors

Long before Jane Foulcher was ordained a priest in the Anglican Church of Australia or had penned her important work 'Reclaiming Humility' (2015), she had a scholarly life in another discipline: medieval history. This stood Jane in good stead for her later forays into the writings of the medieval mystics and sowed the seeds for decades of fruitful engagement with the fertile spiritual heritage of the medieval church, but it was not always the saints who primarily interested her. Jane's interests as a student, like many studying medieval history at the University of Sydney during the 1970s, were instead drawn to the study of witchcraft and heresy. In 1978 Jane wrote her first scholarly dissertation, an honours thesis in the Department of History on the intriguing topic of "Catharism and Courtly Love: Women and Sexuality in Southern France 1050 to 1250."