Publication details
Cathars as cultural waste : a global theory of Cathar heresy as "the Other" of a new social order
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| Year of publication | 2012 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | This paper presents a theory of the function of Cathar heresy in the intellectual culture of 13th-century Western Christendom, based on previous scholarship about the transformation of Western Christendom from 11th century onwards (Max Weber, Herbert Grundmann, Norman Cohn, Lester K. Little, Robert I. Moore, Dominique Iogna-Prat, Pilar Jiménez Sanchez etc.). It interprets the polemical image of Cathar heresy, defined by dualism, rejection of the world, of marriage, of purgatory etc., as a negative selfimage of a particular intellectual elite linked to universities and mendicant orders and struggling for intellectual and political hegemony. This image of "the other" was used as a tool to define a new Christian identity emerging in the 12th-13th century, based on positive view of the world and of marriage, on the integration of Christian society by the idea of purgatory, and on a new ecclesiology. Dualist beliefs, actually emerging in dissenting groups, were systematized, transformed and hyperbolized by polemists in order to restate what Christendom should – and should not – look like. In this view, Cathar heresy can be understood as a sort of "cultural waste", incarnating radically ascetic ideas and practices undergoing a process of marginalization. |