BAGNOLESI. – Cathar heretics (v.) who in Lombardy in the 13th century constituted an intermediate group between the two Albanesi (v.) Concorezzesi (v.). Their name derives from a locality in Lombardy where they had a hierarchical center: Bagnolo Mella (Brescia), or Bagnolo Cremasco, or more probably Bagnolo S. Vito (Mantua). The inquisitor R. Sacconi (ca. 1250) reckons their professed members at 200 and spreads their followers across the territories of Mantua, Brescia, Bergamo, Milan, and Romagna; but the members of the Cathar Churches of the Marca Trevisana, Tuscany, and the Spoleto Valley also adhered for the most part to the doctrines of the b.; inquisitorial proceedings show that in the second half of the 13th century hierarchs and affiliates of this sect were active in Verona, Sirmione, Vicenza, Rimini, Ferrara, and Bologna. The b. are also called francigenae, because the members of the Cathar Church of ancient France who emigrated to Lombardy and the region around Verona shared their doctrinal position; in some sources they are called caloiani, after one of their bishops named Caloianus.
The b. followed the mitigated or monarchian dualism of the Concorezzesi: the devil, personification of evil, did not create but merely composed, from the four primordial elements, the material world and human bodies; imprisoned within these are souls, which did not originate through traducianism, as the Concorezzesi maintained, from the spirit confined by the devil in the body of the first man, but were created by God all at once before the formation of the world and sinned in heaven; some of them will be saved, while others will remain damned. Like the Albanesi, the b. were Docetists: Jesus Christ had a celestial body, which he took from the Madonna, herself also an angel; the Passion, like the whole of Jesus’ life, was apparent; they derived this docetic doctrine from a certain Nazzaro, a Concorezzese bishop, who at the end of the 12th century imported it from the Cathar Church of Bulgaria. The intermediate position of the b. made their transition to different opinions easy.
XIIIe siècle, Paris 1896, pp. 124-33; Ilarino da Milano, Fr. Gregorio, vescovo di Fano, e la «Disputatio inter catholicum et paterinum haereticum», in Aevum, 14 (1940), pp. 114-24; id., Il «Liber supra Stella» di Salvo Burci, in Aevum, 16 (1942), pp. 314-16; A. Dondaine, Le manuel de l'inquisiteur (1230-1330), in Archivum Fratr. Praedic., 17 (1947), pp. 174-80.
Ilarino da Milano