Bagnolensi

BAGNOLENSI. - Cathar heretics (v.) who in the 13th century constituted in Lombardy a middle group between the two opposing Cathar currents of the Albanenses (v.) and the Concorezzesi (v.). Their name comes from a Lombard locality in which they had a hierarchical center: Bagnolo Mella (Brescia), or Bagnolo Cremasco, or more probably Bagnolo S. Vito (Mantua). The inquisitor R. Sacconi (ca. 1250) counts their professed members at 200 and scatters their followers throughout the territories of Mantua, Brescia, Bergamo, Milan, and Romagna; but the members of the Cathar Churches of the March of Treviso, Tuscany, and the Spoleto Valley also mostly adhered to the doctrines of the Bagnolesi; from inquisitorial trials it emerges that in the second half of the 13th century hierarchs and affiliates of this sect were operating at Verona, Sirmione, Vicenza, Rimini, Ferrara, and Bologna. The Bagnolesi are also called francigenae, because the members of the Cathar Church of ancient France, having emigrated to Lombardy and to the Verona area, shared their doctrinal position; in some sources they are called caloiani, from one of their bishops named Caloianus.

The Bagnolesi follow the mitigated or monarchical dualism of the Concorezzesi: the devil, personification of evil, did not create but only composed from the four primordial elements the material world and human bodies; in these the souls are imprisoned, and these souls do not come by traducianism, as the Concorezzesi would have it, from the spirit enclosed 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; part of them will be saved, part will remain damned. Like the Albanenses, the Bagnolesi were docetists: Jesus Christ had a celestial body, which he took from the Virgin Mary, she too an angel; the passion, like the whole life of Jesus, was apparent; they derived this docetic doctrine from a certain Nazarius, a Concorezzese bishop, who toward the end of the 12th century imported it from the Cathar Church of Bulgaria. The middle position of the Bagnolesi made their passage 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