The Cathars (The Peoples of Europe)

This is the first comprehensive account in English of the most feared and the most mysterious of medieval heretics.

The Cathars of medieval Europe were so named, wrote one German theologian, because in their satanic rituals they kissed the backsides of black cats. Had he known his Greek, he would have recognized that the Cathars took their name from a word meaning "purified," but he certainly had a firm grasp on Christendom's official sentiments: the Cathars, members of various sects who rejected the opulence of Roman and Byzantine Christianity alike and took vows of poverty and chastity, were despised wherever their heresy traveled.

Originating in Asia Minor and brought to Europe by way of Bulgaria, the rise of Catharism prompted the first recorded burnings at the stake in France, led to the establishment of the papal Inquisition and the Dominican order of monks who conducted it, and caused the deaths of untold thousands of men, women, and children over a three-century period from about 1200 to 1459, when the official Cathar church was outlawed in its final stronghold, Bosnia. Lambert writes with dry authority on the curious history of this doctrine and official response to it. --Gregory McNamee