This book examines the beliefs and lived religion of men and women attached to the dualist Christian sect known as Catharism in the Languedoc region of southern France between the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. Its main sources are the interview records of mendicant inquisitors charged with the identification and elimination of heterodoxy. The ordained ministers of the Cathar sect – called ‘good men’ and ‘good women’ by sympathisers, ‘heretics’ by the inquisitors – are not its principal concern, however. Instead its primary focus is on the large number of non-ordained men and women who made up the majority of its membership.

A great deal of material has been written about the Languedocian Cathars. Many of these studies focus on the theology of the sect, on its rituals, or on the careers of its leaders. Others have mapped the history of the movement in Languedoc from its emergence there in the mid-eleventh century to its gradual dwindling at the hands of orthodox persecutors. Catharism also plays a large part in the tourist industry in the modern région of Languedoc-Roussillon, whose Pays Cathare road signs will be familiar to any modern tourist. There are at least two series of bandes dessinées – comic books – devoted to the Cathars, and they have recently appeared in UK households in Kate Mosse's Labyrinth series of novels, and its television adaptation.