Historian Pegg has produced a swift-moving, gripping narrative of a horrific crusade, drawing in part on thousands of testimonies collected by inquisitors in the years 1235 to 1245. These accounts of ordinary men and women bring the story vividly to life.

Throughout the Middle Ages and early modern Europe theological uniformity was synonymous with social cohesion in societies that regarded themselves as bound together at their most fundamental levels by a religion. To maintain a belief in opposition to the orthodoxy was to set oneself in opposition not merely to church and state but to a whole culture in all of its manifestations. From the eleventh century to the fifteenth, however, dissenting movements appeared with greater frequency, attracted more followers, acquired philosophical as well as theological dimensions, and occupied more and more the time and the minds of religious and civil authorities. In the perception of dissent and in the steps taken to deal with it lies the history of medieval heresy and the force it exerted on religious, social, and political communities long after the Middle Ages. In this volume, Edward Peters makes available the most compact and wide-ranging collection of source materials in translation on medieval orthodoxy and heterodoxy in social context.

On two hundred and one days between May 1, 1245, and August 1, 1246, more than five thousand people from the Lauragais were questioned in Toulouse about the heresy of the good men and the good women (more commonly known as Catharism). Nobles and diviners, butchers and monks, concubines and physicians, blacksmiths and pregnant girls--in short, all men over fourteen and women over twelve--were summoned by Dominican inquisitors Bernart de Caux and Jean de Saint-Pierre. In the cloister of the Saint-Sernin abbey, before scribes and witnesses, they confessed whether they, or anyone else, had ever seen, heard, helped, or sought salvation through the heretics. This inquisition into heretical depravity was the single largest investigation, in the shortest time, in the entire European Middle Ages. Mark Gregory Pegg examines the sole surviving manuscript of this great inquisition with unprecedented care--often in unexpected ways--to build a richly textured understanding of social life in southern France in the early thirteenth century. He explores what the interrogations reveal about the individual and communal lives of those interrogated and how the interrogations themselves shaped villagers' perceptions of those lives. The Corruption of Angels, similar in breadth and scope to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou, is a major contribution to the field. It shows how heretical and orthodox beliefs flourished side by side and, more broadly, what life was like in one particular time and place. Pegg's passionate and beautifully written evocation of a medieval world will fascinate a diverse readership within and beyond the academy.

Perceptions about gender and sexuality have shaped the lives of men and women in every known culture and in every period of history. To study these perceptions one must delve into the underlying religious, social, philosophical and scientific influences. Understanding gender and sexuality during the Middle Ages requires an examination of the ideas, laws and institutions of the time--for example, the regulations of the Christian church, the anatomical studies of the medieval medical community, the chronicles of the time and the social criticism found in medieval literature. This reader brings such documents from throughout the medieval world into one collection. Representing a diverse range of ethnic, geographic and religious backgrounds, documents of the late Roman, Germanic, Anglo-Norman, Mediterranean, Byzantine, Slavic, Jewish and Islamic identities are all included. The book's chapters are organized according to nine areas--the Bible; Christian thought; chronicles; law; biology, medicine and science; literature; witchcraft and heresy; Judaism; and Islam--allowing for comparative examination of different societies and periods of the Middle Ages.

This study takes the case of the Trencavel Viscounts of Beziers and Carcassonne, who were the only members of the higher nobility to lose their lands to the crusade, and argues that an understanding of how the Occitan nobility fared in the crusade years must be based in the context of the politics of the noble society of Languedoc, not only in the thirteenth century but also in the twelfth."--BOOK JACKET.

Beatrice's Last Smile is a sweeping narrative history of the medieval west from the beginning of the third century to the beginning of the sixteenth. This book focuses on slow formation of Latin Christendom over a millennium in the aftermath of the disintegration of the western Roman Empire.Beatrice's Last Smile is a sweeping narrative history of the medieval west from the beginning of the third century to the beginning of the sixteenth. The reader travels from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, from the Nile to the Volga, from north Africa to the central Asia, until finally ending inthe Americas. Through a focus on slow formation of Latin Christendom over a millennium in the aftermath of the disintegration of the western Roman Empire, Beatrice's Last Smile is a history of holiness which includes Judaism and the revelations of Muhammad. The narrative moves from the violencewithin fifth-century Britain and Gaul to the Hundred Years War between England and France, from the plague of the sixth century to the Black Death of the fourteenth, from the first crusaders sacking Jerusalem to the Spanish capturing Tenochtitlan, from Viking raids to Mongol invasions, from theinquisitons into heresy to the trials of witches, from a third-century Christian mother dying in a Roman arena to the immolation of Joan of Arc in the fifteenth, from an ancient universe without heaven and hell to a medieval cosmos with a fiery inferno and a shimmering paradise. Over these centuriesthere is an emphasis on individual men and women and their stories woven together with the story of the emergence of a distinctive western culture.

This collection is a notable example of how the cultural history of the middle ages can be written in terms that satisfy both the historian and the literary scholar. John Benton's knowledge of the personnel, structure and finance of medieval courts complemented his understanding of the literature they produced.

The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade brings together a rich and diverse range of medieval sources to examine key aspects of the growth of heresy and dissent in southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the Church’s response to that threat through the subsequent authorisation of the Albigensian crusade. Aimed at students and scholars alike, the documents it discusses – papal letters, troubadour songs, contemporary chronicles in Latin and the vernacular, and inquisitorial documents – reflect a deeper perception of medieval heresy and the social, political and religious implications of crusading than has hitherto been possible. The reader is introduced to themes which are crucial to our understanding of the medieval world: ideologies of crusading and holy war, the complex nature of Catharism, the Church’s implementation of diverse strategies to counter heresy, the growth of papal inquisition, southern French counter-strategies of resistance and rebellion, and the uses of Latin and the vernacular to express regional and cultural identity. This timely and highly original collection not only brings together previously unexplored and in some cases unedited material, but provides a nuanced and multi-layered view of the religious, social and political dimensions of one of the most infamous conflicts of the High Middle Ages. This book is a valuable resource for all students, teachers and researchers of medieval history and the crusades.

The first multivolume encyclopedia to document the history of one of the most influential religious movements of the Middle Ages—the Crusades. The Crusades: An Encyclopedia surveys all aspects of the crusading movement from its origins in the 11th century to its decline in the 16th century. Unlike other works, which focus on the eastern Mediterranean region, this expansive four-volume encyclopedia also includes the struggle of Christendom against its enemies in Iberia, Eastern Europe, and the Baltic region, and also covers the military orders, crusades against fellow Christians, heretics, and more. This work includes comprehensive entries on personalities such as Godfrey of Bouillon, who refused the title "King of Jerusalem," and St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who tore up his own clothing to make symbols of the cross for crusaders, as well as key events, countries, places, and themes that shed light on everything from the propaganda that inspired crusading warriors to the ways in which they fought. Special coverage of topics such as taxation, pilgrimage, warfare, chivalry, and religious orders give readers an appreciation of the multifaceted nature of these "holy wars."

Medievalists, historians, and women's studies specialists will welcome this translation of Herbert Grundmann's classic study of religious movements in the Middle Ages because it provides a much-needed history of medieval religious life--one that lies between the extremes of doctrinal classification and materialistic analysis--and because it represents the first major effort to underline the importance of women in the development of the language and practice of religion in the Middle Ages.