Cathars

This is the first fully comprehensive account in English of the most feared and the most mysterious of medieval heretics, still both vilified and romanticized. A crusade was launched to uproot them in the South of France, the Inquisition developed to suppress them, St. Dominic founded his friars to preach against them. This book puts the Cathars back into the context where they belong - that of medieval Catholicism. It studies the rise and fall of the heresy from the twelfth-century Rhineland to fifteenth-century Bosnia and the Church's counteraction, peaceful and violent. Within the exposition, Italian Cathars are given their rightful place, a chapter is devoted to the puzzle of the Bosnian Church, and perspective is given to Le Roy Ladurie's brilliant but wayward Montaillou. A final survey assesses the legacy of a heresy which still exerts its strange fascination.