The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc (Barber, Longman, 2000)

Malcolm Barber is a historian of the crusades and medieval heresy. This 2000 Longman monograph is a comprehensive scholarly history of the Cathars that sets doctrine and ritual alongside the social and political history of Languedoc and the rise of the Capetian dynasty, including the distinction between absolute and mitigated forms of Cathar dualism. Its limit is the same as every other account built from inquisitorial and polemical material: it reads a persecuted movement chiefly through its persecutors' records.