2018/01/13 by Andrew P. Roach · 1 citation
Arts and Humanities · #Medieval Literature and History #Medieval European Literature and History #Reformation and Early Modern Christianity
paper · doi:10.1093/ehr/cey019
openalex publication_date 2018/01/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/29
Antonio Sennis deserves great credit for his careful and fair editing of the proceedings of the conflicting views of the distinguished, if sometimes cantankerous, scholars of medieval heresy who met at UCL and the Warburg Institute in London in April 2013. The debate is now a familiar one which has been rehearsed for a number of periods and contexts, namely, given that the overwhelming majority of sources about medieval heresy come not from ‘heretics’ themselves, but from their persecutors, is there any way historians can be sure that this classification is not just a result of mindsets driven by pre-conceptions of what is correct or the conscious ‘fitting up’ of opponents? The ‘question’ of the title is the version dealing with the Cathar heresy in Italy and southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Many of the contributors’ positions are well known: Mark Pegg, whose readable and and detailed work, The Corruption of Angels (2001) was one of the first works to doubt ‘Catharism’ more or less states his case in the title of his piece: ‘The Paradigm of Catharism; or, the Historians’ Illusion’. R.I. Moore’s ‘Principles at Stake: The Debate of April 2013 in Retrospect’, while covering some similar historiographical ground, is willing to offer that ‘our differences as to the mundane reality of ‘the phenomenon known as ‘Catharism’” are unlikely to be resolved, but they may yet turn out to be smaller than our agreements’. Reconciliation still seems some distance away, however, given that Moore also insists ‘we cannot agree to settle for half a Cathar’. Peter Biller, a veteran of a similar debate over the usefulness of the term ‘Waldensianism’, does not settle for half a Cathar and, instead, makes an extended critical evaluation of both Moore and Pegg.