Antonio Sennis deserves great credit for his careful and fair editing of the proceedings of the conflicting views of the distinguished, if sometimes cantankerous, scholars of medieval heresy who met at UCL and the Warburg Institute in London in April 2013. The debate is now a familiar one which has been rehearsed for a number of periods and contexts, namely, given that the overwhelming majority of sources about medieval heresy come not from ‘heretics’ themselves, but from their persecutors, is there any way historians can be sure that this classification is not just a result of mindsets driven by pre-conceptions of what is correct or the conscious ‘fitting up’ of opponents? The ‘question’ of the title is the version dealing with the Cathar heresy in Italy and southern France in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Many of the contributors’ positions are well known: Mark Pegg, whose readable and and detailed work, The Corruption of Angels (2001) was one of the first works to doubt ‘Catharism’ more or less states his case in the title of his piece: ‘The Paradigm of Catharism; or, the Historians’ Illusion’. R.I. Moore’s ‘Principles at Stake: The Debate of April 2013 in Retrospect’, while covering some similar historiographical ground, is willing to offer that ‘our differences as to the mundane reality of ‘the phenomenon known as ‘Catharism’” are unlikely to be resolved, but they may yet turn out to be smaller than our agreements’. Reconciliation still seems some distance away, however, given that Moore also insists ‘we cannot agree to settle for half a Cathar’. Peter Biller, a veteran of a similar debate over the usefulness of the term ‘Waldensianism’, does not settle for half a Cathar and, instead, makes an extended critical evaluation of both Moore and Pegg.

"Oxford history of Poland-Lithuania, vol. 1: the making of the Polish-Lithuanian Union, 1385-1569." Slavonica, 23(1), pp. 70–71

Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary, by Miri Rubin Mother of God: A History of the Virgin Mary, by Miri Rubin(London: Allen Lane, 2009; pp. xxvi + 533. £30). Andrew P. Roach Andrew P. Roach Unversity of Glasgow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 127, Issue 529, December 2012, Pages 1471–1473, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/ces292 Published: 26 November 2012

New research on networks has put individual well connected agents at the centre of the spread of many social phenomena, including religious ideas. Much can be learnt from the spread of the medieval Cathar heresy by relatively few individuals, the perfecti. The inquisitors sent to suppress them used various unsuccessful strategies, whose failures can be illuminated by modern network theory. Eventually they achieved success by prioritizing the gaining of information about the movements of heretics and isolating their local contacts. England in the 1550s provides an interesting opposite model of how a society can be radicalized through heavy-handed public persecution. Using a network simulation suggests that the martyrdom of key Protestant leaders may have been a sufficient condition for the conversion of England to Protestantism: had Mary's government not burnt anybody, England might well have remained a Catholic country. These cases suggest, first, that it is important for the rest of society that opinion formers within local communities and families are left alone to make their own judgements on extreme Islamist ideologies, unless they can be shown to have strong active links with terrorism. And second, that it is likely to be more effective to isolate key hubs in a terrorist network by neutralising their close contacts, rather than run the risk of creating a cascade effect through direct persecution and martyrdom. Finally, our work is an illustration of a recent important discovery about systems in which social influence is a determinant of behaviour and ideas: deep knowledge about them can be extracted from limited information. Thus we do not need to know the exact details of a past network in order to be able to draw valuable implications for the present day.

Yet,Christianity also played a fundamental role in consolidating monarchies and regnal identities as well. This is particularly relevant when considering Pohl’s and Wolfram’s critique of traditional conceptions of ethnicity. Not only did Western Christendom expand to include new populations, but, in the process, greatly contributed to transforming them into peoples, as is made evident by the Scandinavian, Hungarian, and Spanish cases, while the abovementioned characteristics of the Empire made such developments more complex in its territories.A similar relation between unity and diversity can be seen inside the Church, with the monastic orders, for instance. However, one is left wondering how unique Western Christendom was in this.

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsHeresy and the Persecuting Society in the Middle Ages: Essays on the Work of R. I. Moore. Michael Frassetto , R. I. Moore Andrew P. RoachAndrew P. RoachPDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 83, Number 1Jan., 2008 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400012641 Views: 20Total views on this site Copyright 2008 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

There is a large and rapidly increasing literature which analyses social networks for which substantial amounts of quantitative data are available. Further, there is a growing and related literature on what is referred to by economists as ‘information cascades’ on such networks. However, there is little discussion of the specific events which lead to either the creation of a network in the first instance, or of how a network which is latent in terms of its awareness evolves into a network on which individual behaviour/beliefs are actually altered. In this paper, we describe the process of emergence and evolution of a historical cultural and social network across which the opinions and behaviour of individuals were influenced. We also illustrate how empirical networks can be reconstructed relying principally on information contained in qualitative, historical sources. The specific example we use is religious belief in England in the 1550s. We describe how the burnings of Protestant leaders by the Catholic Queen Mary (1553-1558) created a set of martyrs which was decisive in increasing support not just for Protestantism compared to Catholicism, but which led to the rapid disappearance of rival Protestant factions. The network of awareness of key religious leaders already existed prior to Mary’s accession to the throne. But her actions converted this into a network on which individual beliefs were affected, in this case decisively for English history.

Preface Introduction 1. The Monopoly, 900-1135 2. Markets, Troubadours, Universities and Heretics 3. A World of Choices: Organised Heresy in Easter and Western Europe 4. Nails to Drive out Nails: The Albigensian Crusade, Fourth Lateran Council, Dominic Gusman and Francis of Assisi 5. Competing for Souls: From the Death of Francis to the fall of Montsegur 6. Restricting Choice: The Inquisition and the Decline of the Cathars 7. The Decline of the Holy Men: 1244-1300 8. Women and Heresy 9. Just as there are Seventy Two Tongues...': The Decline of Organised Heresy Further Reading Abbreviations

Hugh Eteriano, Contra Patarenos. Edited by Bernard Hamilton, Janet Hamilton and Sarah Hamilton. (The Medieval Mediterranean. Peoples, Economies and Cultures, 400–1500, 55.) Pp. xvi+255 incl. 2 ills. Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2004. €85. 90 04 14000 X; 0928 5520 - Volume 57 Issue 4

Journal Article Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe Get access Belief and Unbelief in Medieval Europe. By JOHN H. ARNOLD (London: Hodder Arnold, 2005; pp. 320. Pb. £16.99). Andrew P. Roach Andrew P. Roach University of Glasgow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume CXXI, Issue 493, September 2006, Pages 1112–1114, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cel217 Published: 01 September 2006

Qualitative evidence suggests that heresy within the medieval Catholic Church had many of the characteristics of a scale-free network. From the perspective of the Church, heresy can be seen as a virus. The virus persisted for long periods of time, breaking out again even when the Church believed it to have been eradicated. A principal mechanism of heresy was through a small number of individuals with very large numbers of social contacts. Initial attempts by the Inquisition to suppress the virus by general persecution, or even mass slaughtering, of populations thought to harbour the "disease" failed. Gradually, however, the Inquisition learned about the nature of the social networks by which heresy both spread and persisted. Eventually, a policy of targeting key individuals was implemented, which proved to be much more successful.

Journal Article Power and Purity: Cathar Heresy in Medieval Italy, Carol Lansing Get access Andrew P. Roach Andrew P. Roach University of Glasgow Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The English Historical Review, Volume 116, Issue 465, February 2001, Pages 175–176, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/116.465.175 Published: 01 February 2001

This article deals with the practice and theory of penances imposed on heretics by inquisitors in southern France before 1250. At first inquisitors offered a simple choice between penance as proof of conversion or death by burning. Lay resistance forced a subtler approach whereby penitents were removed from the local community in order to be gradually reintegrated into the wider Catholic one. The construction of prisons and the imposition of crosses helped turn inquisitors into an institution. From being a means to the destruction of organized heresy, they became a permanent police force of doctrinal orthodoxy.