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 launch
This concise and balanced survey of heresy and inquisition in the Middle Ages examines the dynamic interplay between competing medieval notions of Christian observance, tracing the escalating confront
This concise and balanced survey of heresy and inquisition in the Middle Ages examines the dynamic interplay between competing medieval notions of Christian observance, tracing the escalating confront
Righteous Persecution examines the long-controversial involvement of the Order of Preachers, or Dominicans, with inquisitions into heresy in medieval Europe. From their origin in the thirteenth centur
This comprehensive three-volume history of the medieval Inquisition by the influential American scholar Henry Charles Lea, first published in 1888, was firmly based on primary sources, and adopted a rationalist approach that departed from the pious tone of earlier histories of the middle ages. Lea was convinced that the Inquisition was not arbitrarily devised and implemented but was an inevitable consequence of forces that were dominant in thirteenth-century Christian society. In Volume 3 Lea focuses on particular aspects of the Inquisition. He considers the impact of the Inquisition on scholarship and intellectual life and on faith and culture, and describes how movements including the Franciscans and the Fraticelli gained prominence. He shows how the concept of political heresy was used by the Church and the State, and argues that belief in sorcery and witchcraft in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was stimulated by the Church authorities.
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 me
What should historians do with the words of the dead? Inquisition and Power reformulates the historiography of heresy and the inquisition by focusing on depositions taken from the Cathars, a religious
In the final years of the fourteenth century, waves of persecution shattered German-speaking Waldensian communities, with the scale of inquisitions matching or even greater than the better-known trial
From the Gregorian reforms to the Protestant Reformation, heresies and heretics helped shape the religious, political, and institutional structures of medieval Europe. Within this larger history of re
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. Thei
Cathars have traditionally been regarded as the most organised challenge to orthodox Catholicism in the medieval West; historians have considered their set of beliefs, inspired by Balkan dualism, as t
