I'm delighted to have provoked John Mundy's extremely interesting 
comments, and its good to hear that he continues to develop what he 
has written on catharism in and around Toulouse, and especially his 
point that heresy, at least among the elites, seems ot appeal to 
losers rather than winners. I'm sure that is right, though I 
continue to have a bias of my own in favour of (since I approve of 
heretics) travelelrs and artisans - maybe even musicians... 

However, one of the questions this takes us to is how the sociology 
of heresy, and indeed its mechanisms, may change over time. I've no 
doubt at all that by the time John Mundy's evidence kicks in 
Catharism was pretty well estblasihed in and around Toulouse. But I 
also note (i) that since the Council of Tours in 1163 Henry II, 
followed in a while by Louis VII, was increasingly stridently pushing 
teh image of Gascony as a land crawling with heresy for reasons 
which had exactly as much to do with his zeal for unvarnished truth 
and  Catholic orthodoxy as anyone who has ever looked at anything 
else he did would expect, and (ii) that there had probably been 
people known as, or called, boni homines in that countryside for 
centuries - see Valerie Flint passim and the process of labelling 
local elites when you decide that the time has come to bring them 
under your thumb. So the question is, when and why did the good men 
become Cathars, and was it before or after they had become heretics? 
My guess is still that Cathar ideas (which were not so very strange 
except in strictly intellectual terms)  reached the region in the 
1160s or so, but that their reception was much facilitated both  by 
divisions among the elites within the region and by the increasing 
propensity of outsiders to meddle which goes back to Bernard's trip 
in 1145. And of course that wasn't the first time country folk and 
other recalcitrants had been called heretics, but as I said before I 
really don't think one can deduce anything from that about what they 
thought or did. However, the question I wanted to raise here because 
though unanswerrable it's very intersting to think about, is how you 
get from my scenario, or something roughly like it in the middle 
decades of teh c. xii to John Mundy's (relatively) splendidly 
documetned one from around the 1170s. But if you reckon that's 
nonsense, John, please say so.

Bob Moore

Bob

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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