I find Mark Gregory Pegg's A Most Holy War a pretty persuasive, if somewhat self-consciously iconoclastic piece of work on the subject. It ties in with a lot of R I Moore's work, of visible difference in cultural and religious practices being used as a pretext for the exertion of control by one group over another.

Although I think it's possible to divorce the religious aspect from the Albigensian Crusade a little too much and paint it as an exclusively political conflict the 'culture war' aspect is pretty important, especially when you take into account the accusations of influence by Arians, Bogomils, Paulicans and other Inquisitorial bogeymen. It always seemed to me that a major reason these were such credible accusations in the case of Southern France might have been that compared to Northern France, the Languedoc was a manifestly more outward looking culture and seemed to be more open to Eastern influences.

I can only be brief as I am about to go out, so hopefully I will have time to expand this tomorrow, but in brief, though the Pegg/Moore thesis is quite compelling (and very worthwhile even if you don't fully affirm its conclusions), there are important counterpoints that need to be made. This is particularly the case when we move out of the twelfth century into the thirteenth and onwards (where it becomes less clear that there was no such thing as "Catharism").

For a brief counterpoint to this thesis, it would be worth looking at Peter Biller's reviews of Pegg's The Corruption of Angels (unfortunately in a journal not freely available) and of Moore's The War on Heresy.

The inquisition records for the trial of Béatrice de Planissoles might be of some interest to this discussion. In 1320, the Bishop of Pamier, Jacque Fournier, (later Pope Benedict XII) was called to interrogate the villagers of Montaillou on rumors of Cathar heresy in the village.

Personally, I fall into the camp that sees the “Cathars” as local, divergent beliefs in the Languedoc that had the misfortune of being viewed by the Church through the looking glass of the superstar heresies of Late Antiquity. Jacque uses the Manicheans as a model to question Beatrice, a heresy that had had its heyday in the fourth and fifth centuries. I think this makes pinning down what these people actually believed difficult because when you’re using a one thousand year old grading rubric, the classic heresies invariably gets mixed in with the new as the courts look for patterns in heterodox individuals. Now I think there’s something going on here –there’s definitely divergent belief that isn’t towing the orthodox line— and I don’t think there’s an organized heresy here, at least not in the way that the medieval church and some historians have defined it. What jumps out to me is the intense localism of the heresy (the heretics mistrust and cannot be found among the peoples in the low-lands) and what seems to me to be evidence of local superstitions and associated practices:

Certain objects, strongly suggestive of having been used by her to cast evil spells, were found among her affairs, and she acknowledged them as hers, such as: two umbilical cords of infants, found in her purse, linens soaked with blood which seemed to be menstrual, in a sack of leather, with a seed of cole-wort and seeds of incense slightly burned; a mirror and a small knife wrapped in a piece of linen; the seed of a certain plant wrapped in a muslin, dry piece of bread that is called "tinhol" (millet bread?), written formulas, numerous morsels of linen -- because of these objects there was a strong suspicion that this Beatrice was a witch and familiar with casting spells.

Some have argued that the accusations of witchcraft and spell-casting in association with heresy reflect more local superstitions than ritual practices characteristic of an organized sect. Rural Europe in the thirteenth and fourteenth century was a wonky place, and orthodox doctrine was not always felt on the local level. Shoot, Lateran IV (1215) complains about all the priests who could barely read Latin (hence the emphasis on education reform for the clergy), so I think a theological disconnect between the higher-ups and your rural priests and laymen is certainly possible, if not likely. Nor do I think it was really unusual to have divergent, local, superstitions. So why does the Cathar craze of the 13th and 14th centuries seem confined only to the Languedoc?

I think the answer lies in the religious and political tension surrounding the Languedoc during the century that frames the Cathar heresy. The barons and other local nobles in the region seemed to have consistently flouted the authority of both the French monarchy and papal representatives. It’s not unusual to read letters between bishops and the French king complaining about the most recent infringement on ecclesiastical or monarchical authority by one of the local counts. And it’s these local lords who seem to be at the center of the Cathar movement. Innocent III accuses them of harboring heretics and releases all laymen from their oaths to their heterodox masters. According to both pope and king, the Languedoc was a place resistant to the authority of both the French monarchy and Rome, and needed to be brought into line. When papal inquisitors started looking around with their manuals on ancient heresies in a region rife with unruly nobles and wonky superstitions, I don’t think it’s too terribly surprising that they happened to find heresy.

The only reference that might suggest anything to the contrary is the repeated references by Beatrice to the good Christians. I’m still not entirely sure what to make of that moniker, and would welcome a discussion on it, because it seems to me the closest we get to an identifying label on the part of the accused. It might suggest some form of organization, but the record seems to be such an odd mix of old heresies, sexual deviancy, and local superstitions that I don’t know if it’s possible to sort out where one begins and the other ends. The good Christians are filtered through Beatrice (unless she was one?) and Jacque Fournier before it reaches us, making definitions of the heretics’ self-identification difficult. Thoughts on how to tackle this?

For me though, perhaps the most damning evidence of all is that to my knowledge we do not have a single text written by someone claiming to be a Cathar. Everything we know about them comes to us through the filter of papal inquisitions and other orthodox writings. Can we call it a bonafide heresy if there’s no evidence for an organized, systematic series of beliefs that fall outside of orthodoxy? Maybe it all depends on how we define heresy. I think there certainly was divergent, heterodox belief in the Languedoc, but I’m just not sure I see the evidence for a community of shared, formalized belief that matches with the Catholic Church’s Cathar label.

Add on: I also find it telling that outside of the traditional heretical beliefs, the rejection of transubstantiation and the ability of the priesthood to hear confession and offer absolution seem to be the two biggest doctrinal concerns- two crucial topics addressed by Lateran IV (Canons I and XXI). I'm just a little suspicious that when the papacy is stressing the Eucharist and confession, those nobles who are flouting papal authority happen to take issue with both (maybe they did though, as a form of rebellion? reject papal authority by rejecting two important, recent issues?).

/u/qed1 below brought up the debate between Moore and Billet, and it provides some useful context to the questions you've posted. No one has really approached your actual questions so I'll take some steps in that direction based on where my thinking is lately. I'm going to work backwards from the last part of your last question.

At the end of Billet's review of Moore's War on Heresy (which provides substantial focus for the question of existence of 'Cathars', the 'Cathar Church' and high middle ages Manicheaism) he writes:

I am puzzled about the difference between my hatred of medieval persecution and Moore’s. My hatred does not have to be helped by the notion that whenever an inquisitor ordered someone to be burnt to death his own imagination had conjured up what that person believed. I can see the moral calculus at work, that persecutors who get it wrong are even worse than persecutors that get it right: so add that to their indictment. But the cost is high: denying to men and women in 13th-century Languedoc what they believed in when they chose an agonising death.

Moore, in his response to review (that are such a great feature of academia), writes back:

We do not ‘deny to men and women in 13th-century Languedoc what they believed in when they chose an agonising death’. We try to get what they believed in right. I began The War on Heresy in the conviction that ‘to deny the myths is not to deny the victims themselves or their dreadful fate’ and concluded it with the reflection that while it is often impossible to discern the theological underpinning of their faith ‘that is not a reason to accept at face value the construction put upon it by their enemies’ , or, I might have added, to ignore the circumstances in which accusations were brought against them.

Well the stakes are high, aren't they? This is about the very essence of the work of historians: getting it right and making sure the dead have their story told.

I'll admit I find Biller's phrasing to be a little puzzling. If I were to swap out the word 'inquisitor' for 'nazi' his closing remarks would make absolutely no sense to a historian, offensive even:

My hatred [of Nazi persecution] does not have to be helped by the notion that whenever [the Nazis] ordered someone to be [shot] his own imagination had conjured up what that person believed.

I'm not going to digress into deconstruction of Biller's meanings, just simply point out that the work of historians is truth in history. Not big, capital-T, eternal 'Truths' but the truths in telling stories as accurate as we can. And the truths around the story of Cathars and heresy extend beyond whether someone burned for the 'wrong reason', which seems to be far enough according to the implications of Billet's statement. The truth is not about what was in the inquisitor's mind (which would be impossible to enter) but about how we see history and how the voices come out. The voice of the heretics is not just the scream from the pyre, but in fact the silence found when the Paris theologians, the Cistercians, and the papal curia make their pronouncements and weigh human lives in balance. The voices of complicity and resistance during the crusades and the inquisitions.

The foregoing then, is a philoso-historical contemplation of your last question: what do we gain or lose in our classifications, our groupings.

However, more specifically, we already know that enough elements of the received history of the Cathars are just wrong. Badly wrong. And so the question is, in my mind, one of a review of the evidence in the most critical light possible. This likely means effectively taking out the conceptual organizing principles of any grouping of Occitan heretics and restart the project. No Cathars before the crusades, now what?

Some of the most recent scholarship, for example by Claire Taylor on heresy on the Aquitaine/Gascony frontier, is really interesting. She explores an area rarely looked at in middle ages history, let alone heresy, and it's really interesting. And yet she imposes a Cathar model and language onto it whilst being apologetic about it (I suspect because it was written under Bernard Hamilton): it's a terrible anti-dialectical approach if she is trying to bridge historiographic tradition with Moore, et al's thesis.

I'm not of the belief in recovering 'cathar' as an academic term nor as a group descriptor anywhere in the middle ages. No heretic referred to themselves as such, the label has only one use and that is in talking about the limited appearance of the word itself in the primary sources.

In fact, the answer really is: start with no groupings or preconceptions. Let the evidence speak fresh about the actual events, in an actual timeline, and evidence that is weak stands as weak. We will find a diversity of beliefs and perhaps discover that the system of beliefs is inconsistent except for the agency of the historian's choices.

You first question was, did the term actually have use the minds of accusers and descriptors. The term's use was infrequent and not accompanied by description prior to the Albigensian crusade. It shows upa few times in the first half the 13th century with again little to accompany it. On the other ahnd, we have some chroniclers such as Heisterbach, de Lille, and Pierre des Vaux de Cernay providing some generic descriptions of heretics, but not internally consistent and not against the term 'Cathar'.

By the late 13th century there were some expressions of it from monasteries. But, at the point of the spear - the inquisitor - the manuals had not shown the markings of the label 'Cathar', whereas they had shown the transformation over several generations from questions 'what people did and who they associated with', to 'what did they think'. And in the list of things heretics thought were some of the 'hallmarks' of Catharism, as well as many other heresies. So, the inquisitor's tool kit was outfitted with every question possible up to and including non-Cathar heresies such as witchcraft. It in fact tells us that the stable identity of Catharism which historiography claims still wasn't present in the minds of inquisitors.

The most truthful history might end up being: we now have a better understanding of the interplay of theology, power, politics in Occitania, but we don't know much about these people thrown onto the pyre. We might have to accept that we lack a single descriptor for a single movement. However, I believe that is better historical work than inventing the natures and beliefs of those who were burned or otherwise punished.

Trying to find an online pdf - the book that is useful to start with is called 'Heresies of the High Middle Ages' by Wakefield and Evans. I'll pull out my copy when I get to my office in an hour.

According to the online table of contents, there's a set of primary source documents on Catharist writings - It's been almost two decades since my undergraduate thesis on heresies that I'll need to open it up to give you more detail.

Another question, to what extent are Catharism and Bogomilism similar?