R. I. MOORE. The War on Heresy.

Abstract

This is a landmark work of history that sets out to do three things. As R. I. Moore explains in his preface, scholarly work on many aspects of heresy, inquisition, religion, and politics in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries has ramified for the past thirty years. It is high time there was a new synthesis. But a synthesis in this field cannot merely summarize scholarly consensus, for there is none. So the book also makes a bold intervention in its field, pursuing a clear and striking argument with which subsequent historians will have to engage, whether they agree with it or not. Finally, Moore attempts to convey all this synthesis and controversy in an accessible style with the aim of reaching out to a reading public that has shown considerable appetite for heretics, especially the Cathars. The erasure of this word—“Cathar”—from the historical lexicon deserves to be one of the book's lasting achievements. In popular historiography Cathars are portrayed as members of a coherent heretical sect or alternative church, with a systematic theology and an established hierarchy of believers, perfecti, and bishops. What is more, over the past century Catharism has also been a countercultural coat in which historical projections of Marxism, feminism, environmentalism, and occultism have, from time to time, been dressed. Although serious scholars have long recognized that the term imposes more unity upon high medieval dualist heretics than is historically plausible, “Cathars” have held on tenaciously in textbooks and lectures, captivating generations of undergraduate students and symbolizing the exotic appeal of the Middle Ages. For Moore, the persistent hold of “Cathars” on historical writing and teaching is a travesty. There were no such people. But he also goes much further than this, making a very bold case indeed. Taking each piece of evidence for heresy as evidence of its own concerns and its own times, and refusing every temptation to project backward from later sources, he systematically dismantles the case for the existence of a single dualist heresy across Western Europe between the early eleventh century and the beginning of the Albigensian Crusade.