A Most Holy War

The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9737320
AutoresClaire Taylor (0000-0002-8661-3910, University of Nottingham, autor de correspondencia)
Año2010
Volumen125
Número512
Páginas148-150
Fecha de publicación2010-01-19
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaThe English Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0013-8266 • E-ISSN: 1477-4534
EditorialOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/ehr/cep371
OpenAlexW2073271738
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas17

As Mark Pegg observes, ‘Catharism’, understood by most as a twelfth- and thirteenth-century heresy that was especially successful in northern Italy and southern France, has been the subject of diverse and influential popular approaches of late, from which professional historians have tended to distance themselves. Few historians, however, show quite as much contempt for non-academic interpretations as is displayed by Pegg; nor do most dismiss the majority of professional research on Catharism as lightly as does Pegg in the opening sections of this book. The tone is set by an overly confessional preface in which the author establishes his credentials by telling how he visited Montségur, where the thirteenth-century sect made its last stand in 1243–4, and being alone there, amid mere tourists, in interpreting critically the fortress and its implications. His introduction and first two chapters are devoted to snapping the backbone of scholarly heresiology. Along with the rest of Cathar history, we learn that historians have misinterpreted the Albigensian Crusade (1209–29) and the path that led subsequently to Montségur. They have not only been ‘vaguely mistaken, or somewhat misguided’ but ‘breathtakingly wrong’ (p. x). Exactly what they have got wrong about the Crusade is not always entirely clear, but it appears to originate with what they have got wrong about ‘Cathars’ in the first place: historians have erroneously associated similar events and concepts with each other as sloppily as did the medieval clergy (here illuminated by Pegg, as in his previous work, by his ‘hot air balloon’ metaphor, p. xi). He is correct, of course, to point out that no one in the Languedoc was called a ‘Cathar’ by their contemporaries (p. 22). We could add that neither were the early crusades called ‘crusades’. His frustration arises from the fact that this does not stop scholars from noting analogous phenomena and categorising them as one thing rather than another

Ancient history · Art · Battle · Confessional · Contempt · Heresy · Literature · Political science · Politics · Praise · Subject (documents · Theology · Classics · History · Law · Medieval European Literature and History · Medieval History and Crusades · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy