Most of this information was extracted under duress, and it would seem obvious that discussions of the Albigensians based on such sources should be no more reliable than, say, a chronicle of Bolshevism derived from the confessions recited in the Moscow Trials or a history of the German Jews based on Nazi propaganda. All that can firmly be stated is that bloody crusades were conducted against a supposed heresy, and that a large quantity of documentation assembled by their inquisitors is the only resource we have for study. The more that is published about the Albigensians-as the Cathars are also known- however, the less seems to be reliably known of them, and that is a problem for serious students. They and the successful inquisitorial campaign against them have generated three new books in English and the expanded reissue of a classic volume on the Gnostic and dualistic doctrines ascribed to them. This movement of allegedly heretical Christian peasants and minor nobility drew the attention of suspicious religious authorities from the mid-twelfth to the mid-fourteenth centuries in the eastern Mediterranean lands of Languedoc, Catalonia, and Lombardy. The Yellow Cross: The Story of the Last Cathars 1290 - 1329, by René Weis, and A review of The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Albigensians, by Stephen O'Shea
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