My favorite history books annoy both sides in an ongoing argument, and that's what Moore can do here. He'll really piss of those who want medieval heretics to stand in as great martyrs to conscience who were cruelly mistreated by imperialistic, colonising, hegemonic etc etces. He'll also piss of those who see in heresy a genuine danger that needs to be resisted (though not, generally, persecuted).

His argument is, in short, that the 'heretics' of the high middle ages were by and large people who pushed the church's own reformist principles a little too far. The Papacy wanted priests to be better educated, celibate, less corrupt, and less abusive... the 'heretics' were often just people who thought and believed this, but were on the wrong side of other conflicts. They weren't really heretics at all; the problem was that they stood in the way of, for instance, the French king's desire to centralize or bring what we now know as France under his power. Or, later, you could be labelled a heretic for defending traditional, local forms of religion against these universalizing reforms.

Moore discusses dozens of cases, and shows how all of the prosecutions or inquisitions of heresy were the result of many small events: political struggles, yes, but also the increasing use of clerics all educated to see centralized government as a good; the habit of tarring those who disagreed with you about strictly temporal matters as heretics; the very odd belief that 'disagreeing with the pope' was an instance of heresy, even when the pope's opinion was, roughly, "I want that land"... on and on.

The question of how many Cathars there were before the Albigensian Crusade, Moore suggests, is like the question how many witches there were in Europe before the witch-hunts: the persecuted peoples were more or less invented by the persecuted. Those who died did not die for their beliefs; they were not Luther and his 'here I stand.' They were just unfortunates caught up in political squabbles and massive sociological change, eliminated because they had land or wealth that others wanted. There's no moral about holding fast to your beliefs. The moral of the story is, as ever, those with the armor will win.

The downside to his attention to detail is that the book is more or less a mess. Far too many chapters, far, far too many sections, and too much repetition. At the sentence level, though, Moore writes very well. ( )

According to the traditional account, the Cathars were a dualist sect of Balkan origin (and possibly ultimately derived from the Manichees) which arrived in western Europe during the eleventh or twelfth centuries and flourished especially in Lombardy and above all the Languedoc until weakened by the Albigensian Crusade and eventually rooted out by the inquisitors during the thirteenth.

In Moore's view, this picture is largely mistaken. The hostile accounts of Catholic writers have been accepted too uncritically, 13th century descriptions have been unwarrantedly assumed valid for the 12th and even 11th, and political and intellectual contexts have been ignored. In particular, evidence has been evaluated on the assumption there was a cohesive Cathar movement in the first place, rather than that assumption being evaluated in the light of the evidence.

Trying to avoid these methodological errors, Moore's revisionist view is that, yes, there were heretics - ie. people who stubbornly held to their own version of Christianity rather than the Church's - but there was no organized movement, no international Cathar church, no strong connection to Bogomils or other eastern dissidents; and that most heretics didn't believe in anyhing like the standard "Cathar" dualism of heresiological summaries, which owed more to Augustine's description of the ancient Manichees than to contemporary reality.

The book's quite accessibly written - Moore even expresses a probably futile but not entirely absurd hope it may be sold in airports - but I might have prefered if he'd more continuously engaged with traditional interpretations; instead, he first gives his version of the story, and only in the afterword does he briefly discuss the usual account and why he believes it can't be sustained. It may be noted in passing that his own previous works on the subject were more traditional - to an extent he's arguing with himself here. As for to which extent his deconstruction should be accepted, I'll minimize the risk of making a fool of myself and withhold judgment! I'll keep my eyes open for any scholarly responses.

A perverse enjoyment from history as you grow older is that what was mainstream when you started reading history has been proven wrong, contradicted or altered out of recognition. Now this has apparently been happening to the Cathar heresy. From the extensive surviving records the Cathars had a complex theology, ritual and organisation. You could read read Runciman for their theology, ritual, organisation, texts and expansion but he and other historians based much of their version on the written records. It has come to be realised that a great many of these records were written by their inquisitors who questioned heretics following what amounted to a checklist. Just, in fact, as later inquisitors found a complex witches' underground by asking a not dissimilar checklist of questions and getting the answers they expected.

So was Catharism largely the creation of its nemesis? As you would expect the answer is more complex than a straight yes or no. In some ways the concept of heresy had to be created from scratch. For centuries there had been no ‘heresy’ in the West. Did everyone believe the same? Probably not. Many people, clergy and laity, would have been hard put to detail their beliefs. Formal teaching outside monasteries was slight. The church’s organisation was uneven. Some areas like the Languedoc had few priests and even fewer bishops. Elsewhere the priests were ignorant or disgraceful or both, frequently married, sometimes keeping a concubine so to many of their parishioners they would have seemed like one of themselves – no worse but definitely no better.

The very first ‘dualist heretics’ to be burnt were pretty certainly the victims of a political feud. Later there is considerable evidence that the Papacy, in starting to clean up the church and bring it to the people at large, also inadvertently created individuals or groups who came to reject their local priest or bishop because they were unworthy. They wanted priests who were untainted by the world – sounds suspiciously like Cathar perfecti doesn’t it?

In the end Moore leaves open the question of just how many if any of the heretics were Cathars. He not only hints that, at most, it was a tiny number but that most of their neighbours who admired them for their ‘perfect’ lives did not join them. I suppose a strong hint comes from the Waldensians who survived through to the Reformation and today are Protestants. They seem to have shared roots with the ‘Cathars’ and yet appear to have been conventional enough in the end.

The War on Heresy was conceived by the author "in exasperation that railway and airport bookstalls, and even quite serious bookshops, almost never have anything to offer on medieval European history except books on the crusades", and that those popular history works on medieval heresy didn't quite seem up to scratch. His idea was "idea was to knock off in a year or so a lightweight version of what I knew so well." I'm not sure that the complex argumentation and close textual reading used in this book do make it a particularly successful example of popular history—there's no page-turning narrative here that will have people reading it beside the pool in Lanzarote, I think—but as a work of history I think it's incredibly well done.

Moore focuses on France, Germany and northern Italy between the 11th and 13th centuries. He argues that in the early medieval period, accusations of heresy were unusual and confined mostly to the elites, the results of intense and erudite theological debates. However, over the next two centuries, accusations of heresy soared—and it's Moore's contention that this increase was not just concurrent with other social developments like urbanisation, social stratification, a change in the make-up of the aristocracy, and an increasingly hierarchical and centralised church, but a consequence of those changes. It wasn't that the number of "heretics" necessarily increased—for there had always been people who had professed, or quietly believed, in heterodox doctrines—but that a more defined version of "orthodoxy" was created which, for political and theological reasons, excluded many people for the first time.

The medieval theologians who redrew the boundary lines tended to think of all heretics as believing in a similar cluster of ideas—Manichean dualists who abhorred the visible world as a creation of the Devil (and thus either shunned sex entirely, or believed that since all sex was equally sinful, incest was a-okay), who thought that only the spiritual world was God's creation and who disagreed with Catholic administration of sacraments. Some groups seem to have believed these things fully or in part; other surviving documentation seems to indicate different beliefs or practices. Many others may well have been pious and quite orthodox church reformers, different only from, say, the Cistercians or the Premonstratensians in that they were not willing to toe the political line. (No-one, however, likely engaged in the more lurid practices which loomed large in the fevered imagination of Catholic theologians, like heretical Black Masses in which Satan forced heretics to carry out the "sacrament" of kissing a cat's anus.) All, however, were termed "Cathars" or "Perfecti" by contemporary orthodox sources—and thus created a misconception which passed down to the present day, and which historians are only just starting to realise has grossly warped their understanding of what actually happened. The Cathars, in other words, are a phantom phenomenon—we cannot seek to understand the movement more fully because it never truly existed.

R.I. Moore has been studying medieval heresy for more than thirty years, and it shows in the depth of the documentation which he studies in The War on Heresy, his anthropological analysis and the breadth of his contextualisation. At times, he does—rather like the equally venerable and learned Peter Brown—tend to presume a little too much arcane knowledge on the part of his readers, and I would have liked a little more engagement on his part with the previous historiography on medieval heresy. (What he does say on the topic is almost entirely confined to a brief epilogue.) Some may also wonder if he distrusts "orthodox" sources too much—might there be an element of throwing the baby out with the bathwater here? However, this is still an impressive, thoughtful and important book which I believe is going to really help set the stage for scholarly discussion of the topic for the next several years. ( )