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Cathars in Question

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 31; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fh/crx023

1477-4542

René Weis,

Language, Linguistics, Cultural Analysis

In August 2000, a millennial conference on Montaillou was hosted in the famous Ariège village itself. Jean Duvernoy, editor and translator of the greatest of all the extant inquisitorial registers, MS 4030 in the Apostolica Vaticana (better known as the Fournier Register, after the Bishop of Pamiers who conducted the investigation) was present. So was Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie whose seminal book Montaillou is based on Fournier. In attendance too were a number of international scholars. This ripple effect, from the Pyrenees to the wider world, prompted the then Bishop of Pamiers to send one of his acolytes to Montaillou, to investigate and, indeed, confiscate (it seems) the keys to one of the two local churches: ‘Whatever is going on in Montaillou?’, the Bishop is reported to have said, apparently musing whether Catharism was being relaunched in the village. For the Bishop of Pamiers, as for his predecessor Jacques Fournier 700 years earlier, Catharism was evidently a real and present danger. Or should that be the many-headed Hydra of heresy rather than Catharism? The very meaning and specific applications of the word ‘Cathar’ have long been disputed, notwithstanding its pedigree in the records, as Rebecca Risi notes with reference to the decrees of Lateran III and Lateran IV, while Claire Taylor reminds us of the fact that the so-called Cathars rarely called themselves anything other than good men or good Christians. The contributors to this rich and thought-provoking collection are all of them specialists in the field, while holding diametrically opposed views about the very nature of their subject. What is at issue is whether there was an integral, structured and overarching Cathar church, pan-European in scope, or whether there was instead a multiplicity of dualist heresies, local in character, that were uniform only in the eyes of the Catholic church persecutors. The big beasts in this jungle are Peter Biller, R. I. Moore and Mark Pegg, with the last two very much on the side of the sceptics about Catharism. Moore may have the edge. His scrupulous and forbearing scholarship is matched by a pellucid style that allows him to reach a wide audience; a point made too by David d’Avray in his review of non-Catholic sources about heresy in the Middle Ages. Moore’s The War on Heresy, like his earlier research on persecutions in the three centuries from 950 to 1250, quoted liberally from sources, thereby allowing different versions of the past to speak for themselves. To a lay audience, the multiple eyewitness accounts bequeathed us by the inquisitors are gold dust. Most historians working in other periods would give anything to have sources as rich and thrilling as the inquisitorial ones underpinning various decades of the so-called Middle Ages. In the concluding essay of the volume, ‘Goodbye to Catharism?’, Peter Biller takes Mark Pegg, author of The Corruption of Angels, to task for apparently wilfully ignoring rigorous German critical approaches to his subject and for curtailing the scope of his book through the exclusive focus on a single source. Like Biller, Jörg Feuchter argues that in Languedoc at least there existed an organized and ‘self-conscious religious group’. Pegg in turn questions Biller’s scholarship and also offers a fierce critique of his fellow historian David Nirenberg, for daring to doubt dubiety about Catharism as a unified dualist heresy. The occasionally testy tone of this collection bears witness to the passionate nature of the debate. All the essays are underpinned by an intimate knowledge of source materials. Also, historians’ readings of the past differ intellectually from most people’s Pathé Magazine understanding of it, hence perhaps the occasionally baffling turns of the arguments advanced here. In the end, though even hard-nosed historians would probably accept that intellectual judgments about the reality of heresy cannot be entirely divorced from moral ones. Too many people endured terrible deaths during Moore’s centuries of persecution for perceptions and interpretations of heresy not to matter. One of the most refreshing points, made repeatedly and by different contributors, is to warn against the pitfalls of a perspectified merging of past decades and centuries. So much of what is there to be known and interpreted depends on the sources of a particular era and place. And we are constantly, and rightly, reminded of the need to exercise due caution in interpreting these sources: more often than not the veridical status of a set of depositions is determined by the context in which these were obtained. If one of the abiding impressions of this collection is the extent to which the field of Cathar studies is a site for turf wars, it is also the case that individual contributions are deeply learned. Would it not be wonderful if more of this formidable erudition were directed towards editing, translating and publishing the extraordinary primary texts that underpin these debates so that we could all share in our common humanity across the centuries?