One of the most striking aspects of the medieval Inquisition is how few Catholic voices spoke out against it. Around 1048, before the creation of the Inquisition, Wazo, the Bishop of Liege, had urged his fellow ecclesiastics to show forbearance with heretics, reminding them that God 'non vult mortem peccatorum, nee laetatur in perditione moriencium, sed per pacientiam et longanimitatem suam novit peccatores ad paenitentiam reducere' ('desires not the death of sinners nor rejoices in the damnation of the dying, but rather knows how to bring sinners back to repentance through patience and long-suffering').1 As Saul, the persecutor of Christians, eventually became Paul, the great apostle, Wazo had suggested, the heretics of today might be one day prove holier than contemporary Catholics. Beginning in the 1230s, however, popes began to bypass the bishops traditionally charged with pursuing heretics, like Wazo, and to appoint Dominican and, to a lesser extent, Franciscan friars to this task.2 In the Midi, where the people had long protected the heretics among them, they protested the new vigour with which heretics were now being prosecuted, rising up against the inquisitors in Albi, Toulouse, and Carcassonne, among other towns.3 In Lombardy and Germany, similar revolts occurred.4 Still, these citizens insisted that they were not opposed to the Inquisition per se, but only to the tendency of /?^inquisitore to prosecute people who were, in fact, good Catholics. As emotions rose against the Inquisition in Toulouse, for example, we are told, 'Tunc commota est villa contra Fra tres, et mine et verba multa fuerunt contra eos supra modum . . . quia probos homines, ut dicebant . . . accusabant iniuste de heresi' ('The town was ... very much stirred up against the friars; there were even more threats and speeches against them than usual . . . because, the cry was, they were unjustly accusing decent ... men of heresy').5 Even the fiery Franciscan friar Bernard Delicieux, the instigator of the uprising against the Inquisition in Carcassonne, affirmed, 'nunquam fuit intentionis quod faceret aliquid contra officium inquisitionis, imo semper fuit voluntatis ad honorem dicti officii promovendum' ('It was never his intention to do anything against the Office of the Inquisition. Rather, it was always his will to promote the honor of this office').6 Though heretics might condemn the inquisitors as the new Pharisees,7 no Catholics of this time are recorded as having explicitly opposed these friars so long as they pursued genuine heretics.If there seem to have been no Catholic opponents of the Inquisition during the Middle Ages, there are two possible reasons for this apparent silence. On the one hand, it may be that no such opponents existed. R. I. Moore has argued persuasively that, between the tenth and thirteenth centuries, western Europe became what he calls 'a persecuting society'.8 Not only heretics, but Jews, lepers, prostitutes, 'sodomites', and other religious and social minorities were increasingly labelled, investigated, and stripped of civil rights and, occasionally, of life itself. As political, religious, and intellectual authorities consolidated their power during this time, Moore maintains, they found it convenient to stigmatize and segregate these populations in order to affirm the purity and integrity of the bodies they governed and, hence, the legitimacy of their own rule. In this light, one could no longer argue that true Christians should bear with heretics instead of burning them, as Wazo had done, because the inquisitors had succeeded in equating opposition to the Inquisition with opposition to the faith, to the point where they would prosecute anyone criticizing the Inquisition as a heretic himself. On the other hand, if one cannot hear the voices of resistance to the Inquisition, it may be because one has not attuned one's ears to decipher them. In response to Moore, Cary J. Nederman and John Christian Laurson have contended that, while the persecution of religious and social minorities may have intensified during the Middle Ages, Europe never became a 'persecuting society', at least in any monolithic sense. …