The medieval county of Quercy in Languedoc lay between the Dordogne and the Toulousain in south-west France; it played a significant role in the history of Catharism, of the Albigensian crusade launched against the heresy in 1209, and of the subsequent inquisition. Although Cathars had come to dominate religious life elsewhere in Languedoc during the course of the twelfth century, the chronology of heresy was different in Quercy. In the late twelfth century, nearby abbeys were still the main focus of devotional activity; inquisitors' discoveries in the 1240s point to the previous twenty years...

Religion amongst ordinary men and women in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages is the subject of this book. Focusing on laypeople attached to the Cathar movement, it investigates the interplay between heresy and orthodoxy, and between spiritual and secular concerns, in people's lives, charting the ways in which these developed through life cycle: childhood, youth, marriage and death. This period was one of great upheaval in the region, brought about by the Church's response to the perceived threat of heresy, and the book also explores the effects of the Albigensian Crusaders and the inquisitors...

Heresy is always relative; the traces that it leaves to us are distorted and one-sided. In the last few decades, historians have responded to these problems by developing increasingly sophisticated methodologies that help to unravel and illuminate the tangled layers from which the texts that describe heresy are built, but in the process have made our reading of heresy fractured and disconnected.BR> Heresy and Heretics seeks to redress this by reading the different types of anti-heretical writing as part of a wider, connected tradition, considering all the principal orthodox treatments of...

Cathars have long been regarded as posing the most organised challenge to orthodox Catholicism in the medieval West, even as a -counter-Church- to orthodoxy in southern France and northern Italy. Their beliefs, understood to be inspired by Balkan dualism, are often seen as the most radical among medieval heresies. However, recent work has fiercely challenged this paradigm, arguing instead that -Catharism- is a construct, mis-named and mis-represented by generations of scholars, and its supposedly radical views were a fantastical projection of the fears of orthodox commentators. This volume...

The question of the reality of Cathars and other heresies is debated in this provocative collection.