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Mark Gregory Pegg is Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246.

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THE CORRUPTION OF ANGELS:
THE GREAT INQUISITION OF 1245-1246

Between May 1, 1245, and August 1,
1246, more than five thousand people
were intensively questioned in Toulouse
about the "heresy of the good men and
good women" (commonly, though
incorrectly, known as Catharism). Mark
Gregory Pegg examines the sole surviving
manuscript of this great inquisition
with unprecedented care-often in
unexpected ways-to build a richly textured
understanding of life in southern
France in the early thirteenth century
This book is a passionate evocation of
the vibrant rhythms by which thousands
of medieval men and women lived their
lives through half a century of holy war
and religious persecution.
Ajn attractive and readable book on a
sombre theme."

COLIN MORRIS
Times Literary
"Pegg's book lis] provocative, colorful,
and flowing with adrenaline! There
is much to remind one of Carlo
Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms:
the deep reading of one set of interrogations .. .
the high ambition, and
the extraordinary panache with which
the project is realized.. . . Pegg has
pulled off a tour de force. His book
is superbly written: as unputdownable
as a thriller."

"In Mark Gregory Pegg the testimonies
of the great inquisition of 1245-46
have found a historian with the erudition
and imagination to exploit their
riches. Emmanuel Le Roy Laduries
Montaillou, is also, of course, based
on a register of inquisitions in the
Languedoc, some half century later
than this one. But Pegg sets a new
standard in the theoretical sophistication
and consistency--a
grace-with which it is done. This book
is the most sensitive and searching
account of the religion of country people
in any part of Europe in the High
Middle Ages known to me."
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
FundacionRosacruz | 2 andere besprekingen | Jan 7, 2018 |
A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom by Mark Gregory Pegg is an attempt to address misconceptions regarding the Cathar heretics and modern portrayals of them. Pegg makes a strong case that the Cathars never existed, and that the twenty year long crusade in Southern France was a crusade against Albigensian heretics in a very specific geographic area. He has a very negative view towards past histories of these events, and he criticized the sources used in previous scholarship.

Pegg wrote that the Albigensian Crusade was a central event in the Middle Ages. It was the first time a pope called a crusade against Western Christians by declaring them heretics. Christians fought Christians, those who fought for the Pope were promised salvation and the heretics were killed for their unorthodox beliefs. He links the brutal crusade with the medieval mindset, propagated by the Church, in which heretics should be feared and hunted down because they appear so similar to orthodox Christians as to be indistinguishable but in reality they are a dire threat all of Christendom. Crusaders no longer had to travel to the Holy Land in order to receive absolution for sins; a campaign in France was an easier route to the same objective.

While Pegg states that there was a “moral obligation for mass murder,” the Pope was not telling everyone to go to France and kill heretics. There actually seemed to be some hesitation by the public to join this crusade, as Simon de Montfort had to resort to using mercenary armies. Pegg also tries to link the Albigensian Crusade with Christ’s sacrifice on the Cross, and that those who fought fellow Christians were imitating Christ. That connection was a stretch considering that Christ did not advocate violence, especially not against one’s co-religionists. Pegg also stated that, “The Albigensian Crusade ushered genocide into the West by linking divine salvation to mass murder.” He then went on to describe six narrow categories with which to define genocide so that it fits his concept of the Albigensian Crusade.

The chapters where Pegg described the heretics and some of their practices might be difficult for some readers to follow. Those sections seemed overly repetitive and drawn out to ensure the reader got the point. Good men and women were named and their societal and religious practices were explained. Stylistically the rest of the book flowed rather well and the reader will not get slowed down even though there is twenty years of history to read through before the end.

Pegg provides a book which is easy to read and which sheds some new light on the subject of the Albigensian Crusades. He provided sources which support his thesis and does not utilize contradictory evidence. However his strong reaction to past scholarship and inability to remain unbiased in his writing, his emphasis on genocide, and calling the crusade an imitation of Christ partially detracted from the credibility of the book. A good read once I got past the first couple of chapters.
… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
kkunker | 4 andere besprekingen | May 1, 2011 |
Pegg examines a manuscript, known as "manuscript 609", which is a partial copy of the transcripts from the Inquisition in Toulouse. He argues that the inquisitors defined people's identities based on actions rather than beliefs, and that thus identity was seen as relational; that through their questions they redefined how people saw themselves; and that to talk of any international heretical "Cathar" church in the thirteenth century is ridiculous. However, while he pays lip service to the problematics of writing history, he doesn't fully address them. For instance, he acknowledges that the scribes transcribing the answers people gave in the vernacular translated them into Latin, transforming their statements into stock phrases in the process. But then he goes on to draw conclusions from the similarity in different people's responses to the same questions. How can you know this similarity exists in anything other than the scribes translation?… (meer)
 
Gemarkeerd
TinuvielDancing | 2 andere besprekingen | Jan 19, 2010 |

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270
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