Word: cathars
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...There was a time in my primitive past when I dealt with mice by setting out the ancient instruments of death - the medieval cheese-baited mouse-whackers that terminate the hungry midnight rodent like the Inquisition nailing a Cathar. In bed, I would hear a trap going off in the middle of the night: THWACK! A little extinction in another part of the house. In the morning, I would dispose of the carnage...
...ordinary believers did not need to abstain from mutton and love; they had only to receive a deathbed absolution. At that point, they were expected to embark on the endura, a suicidal fast that sped them to heaven. A fellow traveler like Parish Priest Pierre Clergue could turn the Cathar teachings upside down: "Since everything is forbidden, everything is allowed." Clergue was rare in his rapacity, but not in taking concubines. Observes Le Roy Ladurie: "At an altitude of 1,300 meters, the rules of priestly celibacy ceased to apply...
...fierce anticlericalism, and with reason. The regional ruler, the Count de Foix, had defended his fief from exorbitant church taxes. But when the aristocrat died, the bishops of Pamiers imposed ever more onerous tithes. The new church exactions doubtless influenced many villagers to consider the teachings of the Cathar parfaits (perfect ones, the heresy's elect...
Eventually, a growing power struggle between the Cathar Clergue family and a prominent Catholic family blew the whole affair into the tribunals of the Inquisition. Father Pierre and his brother Bernard, the corrupt bailiff of the town, were sentenced to prison, there to die soon after. One Cathar-a not-so-perfect parfait given to shady business dealings and fornication-was burned at the stake. Beatrice de Planissoles, the chatelaine, was released along with her latest swain, another priest-but Beatrice was sentenced to wear the yellow cross of repentant heretics. As for the zealous bishop, he went...
...going. It is rather that the real history is so compelling that the histrionics of her characters sometimes seem frivolous and shoddy intrusions. It is hard, really, to care much about the courtly romance between Roger de Montbrun (Catholic knight of Toulouse) and Lady Gentian d'Aspremont (Cathar heretic), which takes up one-third of the book, at a time when, for example, human heads were actually being used as gun stones, and the brave Count of Toulouse, in order to save his people and make peace with the church, allowed himself to be publicly lashed in Notre Dame...