The Cathar Curse

The Cathar Curse: Heresy and the Making of the Middle Ages opens as a corrective to the standard narrative of Medieval religious strife, one that situates the "Cathars" as the dominant countervailing force to the inexorable doctrinal grip of the Church. As Mark Pegg reveals, the 13th century Cathars were a creation of the 19th century, when scholars invented them as the central players in the grand drama of medieval repression, the romanticized and innocent victims of the Inquisition and its fanatical excesses.

In truth, the Cathars are a distraction from the larger and more compelling story of heresy in the West. "There must be heresies," Paul of Tarsus proclaimed in his First Letter to the Corinthians, "so that they who are of the faith may be proved." This apostolic vision of the sacred necessity of heresy fundamentally shaped Christianity from the Crucifixion to the Reformation. As Pegg shows, the paradox of Western Christianity at once needing and fearing heretics, of imagining conspiracies of dissent even when there were none, and of individuals embracing the role of heretic as a sacred requirement of free will and free speech, still shapes Western culture. Pegg's book offers a dissenting history of the Christianity in the West, one that begins with Christ and ends with Martin Luther, the Protestant Reformation, and the Spanish conquests in the Americas. Along the way, it follows the sources and progress of heretical concepts (including Gnosticism and Arianism) after the collapse of the western Roman Empire into the medieval world, where, especially after the First Crusade, an obsession with heresy gripped popes and preachers in Latin Christendom, culminating in the Albigensian Crusade and the rise of the Inquisition. Finally, he reveals heresy's central part in the dynamic struggle to reform the Church.

Compelling, epic in its scope and sweep, Pegg's book offers nothing less than an alternate history of Western Christianity.