Dear list and especially Profs. Moore and Landes:
To Mr Moore, I read you so long ago and since then have heard quite a
number of papers and participated in many discussions in which people have
cited you as going far beyond what you said that I have obviously come to
believe something wholly fictional. I retract everything I said in that
mailing or on any other occasion.
As to Cathars, I've tried to analyze the evidence about social adhesion in
the town and region of Toulouse and have looked at that for the nearby
Lauragais, for Bishop Fournier and Bernard Gui, and for Foix. The time
span runs from the last quarter of the twelfth to the first third of the
fourteenth century.
At Toulouse and in the Lauragais (just southeast of town) the material of
the twelfth and thirteenth century is somewhat deficient. Women are very
considerably underrepresented and so are the working classes, from middle
to bottom. Obviously. the inquisitors were aiming high in a social sense,
either inadvertently because the rich are more conspicuous or because of
desiring to behead the movement. It is nevertheless undoubted that what
was expressed by Douais was correct, namely that the rural well to do, a
group that was then evolving into the nobility of the later middle ages,
was unusually given to this divergence. When I first read him, I was
suspicious because I wondered if this professor at the Catholic Institute
of Toulouse who ended as Bishop of Beauvais had an "interest", namely a
desire to show that the "people" are naturally orthodox and only the
intellectuals and wealthy heterodox - in the same manner as those
forwarding the sanctity of John Bosco. Later, a mass of primary documents
and especially 609 convinced me he was right. Also, his vision was
reinforced by my own documentary base in the town of Toulouse (my
"Repression of Catharism" and more recently "Society and Government") that
clearly shows that not a few of those condemned by the inquisitors were
patricians, some titled. I also confess to having a bias that militated
against the position favored by my much admired teacher Austin Evans who
emphasized in teaching (not really in writing) the idea that merchants
were inclined to be skeptical, therefore doubting and hence potentially
heretical. But I never wanted to attribute any special religious vice or
virtue to shopkeepers, merchants or investors because the most inventive
part of their function is (in medieval terms) that of the usurer. And
there is primary textual evidence for Waldensian merchants and Caesarius
of Heisterbach and other orthodox polemical writers attribute usury to the
Cathars. Lastly, the attack on heresy in the early 1200s involved an
equally vigorous attack on usury. But I've discussed all this in the two
books mentioned above and do not think it invalidates what I maintain. My
own prejudice is pretty obvious. Being a son of musicians and grandson of
an artisan and a farming woman with whom I lived, I have a bias for (which
I control by remembering some I knew) those who do things with their
hands. Anent the lower orders, of course they got caught up in Catharism
along with their "betters" who were, after all, often their bosses but
they only become dominant by the time of Fournier and Foix when the
divergence was becoming vestigial. So much for conjecture. John Mundy
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