5 - The Heretici of Languedoc: Local Holy Men and Women or Organized Religious Group? New Evidence from Inquisitorial, Notarial and Historiographical Sources

Summary

In what follows I shall present three examples of new evidence for the existence of an organized religious group among the people persecuted for heresy in medieval Languedoc. I shall thus try to make a case against the radical scepticism or ‘deconstructivism’ brought forward – in various degrees of intensity and on diverse points – by Mark G. Pegg, Robert I. Moore, Julien Théry, Monique Zerner, Uwe Brunn and other scholars. I shall not, however, argue for or against a ‘Balkans’ connection, that is to say, a link between the Languedocian group and the Bogomils or other forms of eastern dualism. In fact, I shall not deal with the question of dualism at all. This is simply not within the scope of my text. Rather, I take up a simpler but essential question raised by R. I. Moore: ‘whether there was in fact any division in the society of the lands between the Rhône and the Garonne that corresponded in the eyes of its inhabitants to the distinction between catholics and heretics.’ Moore has answered this question in the negative, mostly by discarding all sorts of evidence. I shall try to present new evidence supporting an affirmative answer.

Before I start, I want to make it clear that I think that the ‘deconstructivist’ case has at least some merit in that it leads every scholar in the field to question both his own presuppositions and those of the sources. However, it is my firm opinion that the critics are overstepping any sensible boundary in their rejection of the ample textual evidence – for example, in inquisitorial records – for the existence of an organized, self-consciously dissident religious group. They also ignore or underplay the critical approaches to the concepts of heresy present in the work of earlier scholars who wrote long before the deconstructionists, such as Herbert Grundmann or Arno Borst. To accuse Grundmann of naivety or lack of awareness, as some among the deconstructivists do, does him wrong and it is itself based on a misunderstanding of his work, as can easily be demonstrated.