I'm looking to buy a book about the cathars and their beliefs. Any recommendations? I'm specifically looking for titles written by acknowledged (academic) historians, not new-age 'mystics' or hack 'journalists'.
Thanks!
edit: Dutch titles are fine too, but so far I haven't found anything interesting.
Historian of medieval heresy here.
You are asking for books about a field which in the last 20 years has seen a lot of academic turmoil, outright antagonism at times. It's pretty exciting and challenging. The turmoil began in the mid-nineties when French historians began to question the 12th and 13th century sources that historians for centuries have used to build a history and theology of Cathars of medieval France. If you read French you could look at the works of Monique Zerner, JP Biget, Uwe Brunn.
Fast forward 20 years, and no historian of any credibility can now use the term 'Cathar' without putting it into quotes. This is because no 'heretic' in southern France either by their own writings or by interview with the inquisition ever referred to the Cathars nor a unified dualist belief system called Catharism. The so-called heretical beliefs and organization are documented in a fragmentary way, much of it coming from ecclesiastics (monks, bishops) many of whom never actually met a heretic or were writing against heresy in principle and not with historical specificity and were recapitulating the arguments of the Church fathers of antiquity. Those ecclesiastics who did meet heretics have often contradictory and incomplete stories.
Perhaps the strongest sign of the changes the debate has brought is that many historians who used 'Cathar' now use 'good men' and 'good women', a literal translation of the term used by subjects of the inquisition to name 'heretics'.
All of this really goes to the question of how much historians create history versus how much they objectively record history.
Where does this leave historians, and you? At this point there tends to be two broad 'camps' of historians of heresy and those struggling between them. The 'traditionalists' are those who are maintaining the (traditional) narrative that there was a dualist (read: Manichaean influenced) counter church in southern France seeded by Bogomil missionaries from Eastern Europe. For good exploration of these ideas and research, you can look at:
Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars (Wiley, 1998)
Malcolm Barber, The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages (Longman, 2000)
Both are excellent, reputable historians. Neither book takes into account historiography since the late nineties and as such they do not really reflect new thinking and research. You can also look at the works of Bernard Hamilton, Peter Biller, Claire Taylor. If you want a survey of dualism and Christianity, the respected Steven Runciman's The Medieval Manichee: A Study of the Christian Dualist Heresy (Cambridge University Press, 1982) will serve, although many of his interpretations are just too fanciful now and this book, while once an important work is now avoided.
The second camp of historians take the approach of intense source criticism, and that scrutiny means looking at the political, social and economic context of heresy in the 12th and 13th century. It means looking in detail at the events and documents which have long defined 'Cathars'. The work of French historians in the 1990's was triggered by Bob Moore in his now very influential survey:
He has recently published a book which I would argue should be your first stop in understanding heresy and Cathars. He purposefully wrote it for a broader audience:
If you want to stick to Cathars per se, then another very readable book is:
Both Moore and Pegg will allow you to understand traditional views on Cathars and the debate about whether they existed.
For my part, I am among the latter historians. Here you can read other posts I have written that explore the question of Cathars, like Cathars and Ranters didn't exist?.
Let me know if you have other thoughts or questions!