Michael D. Barbezat, . Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2018, xii, 271 pp., 6 b/w ill.

As horrible as the punishment by burning someone alive certainly proves to be, it is a modern misconception, as Michael D. Barbezat argues in this new study, to assume that this form of execution was the standard judicial tool in the Middle Ages. By contrast, burning heretics and others was rather the exception, as all available data confirm. Whether there were actually heretics, in an organized fashion, as the older school of thought claimed, or whether they mostly existed in the heads of the learned elite during the high and late Middle Ages, as the more recent cohort of scholars suggests, does not have to be decided here, but Barbezat outlines these two groups clearly enough in the introduction. One curious aspect in the larger question regarding actual burning would also be that the costs and the time it took to burn a person completely were considerable, whereas hanging, drowning, or execution by the sword was swift and affordable. The recent study by Romedio Schmitz-Esser,