| Description |
Did a secret Cathar Church exist in twelfth- to thirteenth-century Europe? Is it possible to identify this Church on the basis of dualism, understood as the belief in the creation of the material world by the devil or in the eternal existence of two opposed principles, good and evil? This book reopens the classical canon of texts on the Cathars, from Ebervin of Steinfeld’s letter (1140s) to Bernard of Clairvaux all the way up to the register of Jacques Fournier (1318-1325), carefully organizing these texts by genre and period, and narrating the intriguing story of the endeavour, medieval and modern, to define the Cathar heresy in terms of dualistic tenets. With the aim rather of understanding than dismissing it, the book cautiously dismantles the curious conglomerate of ideas modern scholars called “dualistic”, and demonstrates that the construction of dualist heresy was, in fact, a collaborative enterprise in which Catholic polemists, imbued with patristic images of Manicheism and striving to define the orthodox position in opposition to its enemies, interacted with the processes of self-definition and doctrinal evolution of various nonconformist groups, mainly in the Rhineland, northern Italy, and southwestern France. Growing knowledge of dissident ideas, rituals, and networks transformed the original patristic habits of the writers on heresy, while these networks themselves underwent deep changes due to their internal dynamics as well as to the way they were conceived by their Catholic opponents. The book argues that, for Catholic thinkers, dualist heresy was a preeminent “other” whose function in the culture of its time was to delegitimize some old Christian ecclesiological ideas and radical ascetic behaviours, and to define a new, relatively world-affirming version of urban Christianity. At the outset, therefore, dualist heresy was a polemical caricature, but never a simple invention. The knowledge on heresy described very real myths and practices, and it was constantly growing and changing. Far from being a simple transposition of patristic polemics, the concept of dualist heresy is nothing less than an important indicator of deep doctrinal and social transformations in Western Christendom between 1140 and 1330.
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