ANST - Book Review: _The_Cathars_

[njones at ix.netcom.com]

Greetings Friends!

I was sent an interesting book review from a friend that I thought
I would pass on.  ISBN information is included at the end of the
review.

Gio
Northkeep
Ansteorra

********
http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/danny/book-reviews/h/Cathars.html 

title: The Cathars 
by: Malcolm Lambert 
publisher: Blackwell 1998 
subjects: medieval history, religion 

A rather dense academic survey, Lambert's _The Cathars_ is really
for the specialist rather than the general reader. (I don't know, 
however, that there is a popular general introduction to Catharism: 
most of the more accessible books focus on Languedoc and the 
Albigensian crusade.)  Lambert takes a chronological and regional 
approach, addressing issues of doctrine and institutional structure as
they arise. He begins with chapters on heresy in Western Europe 
before the eleventh century and on the Bogomils and early Catharism 
in the Rhineland; he finishes with chapters on Pierre Autier and the 
brief revival of Catharism around the beginning of the fourteenth 
century, on the decline of Italian Catharism, and on the Bosnian 
Church. In between he covers the rise of Catharism in the 
Languedoc and the Catholic response, from Innocent III and the 
launching of the crusade to the gradual formalisation of the
Inquisition. 

It was the material on the Italian and Bosnian Cathars that I found 
most interesting. In Languedoc doctrinal differences were not critical 
and a broadly unified church structure persisted. In Italy, in contrast, 
allegiances to competing Eastern _ordo_ and conflicts over doctrine 
rifted Cathars into separate communities: Lambert sorts through the evidence to reveal their differences in theology and organisation. 
The complex political balance in Italy between cities, Guelf and 
Ghibelline factions, papacy, and empire resulted in idiosyncratic variations in the treatment of Cathars, but their survival was generally
assisted by the unwillingness of independent cities to grant church authorities the powers needed for forcible suppression. The Inquisition and lay Catholic confraternities certainly helped it along, but Catharism's gradual decline in Italy was largely due to changes in the 
Catholic Church which reduced its appeal.  (Cathar remnants in the Alps, syncretising with Waldensianism, survived until the early fifteenth century.) The history of the Bosnian Church took a very different course. "[W]hen heretics had authority, freedom and 
a landed endowment ... [t]heir leaders became virtually indistinguishable from the wealthy and powerful hierarchies of either
the Catholic or Orthodox Churches of the time." 

-- 

%T The Cathars 
%A Malcolm Lambert 
%I Blackwell 
%C Oxford 
%D 1998 
%O paperback, references, index 
%G ISBN 0-631-20959-X 
%P 344pp 
%K medieval history, religion 

31 October 1999 

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Copyright (c) 1999 Danny Yee (danny at cs.usyd.edu.au) 
http://www.anatomy.usyd.edu.au/danny/book-reviews/ 
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