Mark Pegg writes extremely engagingly and paints a vivid picture of the diplomatic initiatives and military campaigns of the Albigensian Crusade. His knowledge of the geography and landscape of the south of France is impressive and he depicts a fascinating pre-crusade world of provinciales and boni homines, of mountain-top castra and of southern-French values of cortezia and paratge. He shows a thorough understanding of the primary sources for the crusade and is obviously soaked in the major chronicle accounts such as those of Peter of les Vaux-de-Cernay, William of Tudela and the Anonymous Continuator. Yet although he tries to be even-handed in his treatment of southern French lords and crusaders, detailing horrific slaughter and massacres on both sides, his particular cynicism about ‘the army of God’ is evident. His depiction of crusaders viewing the crusade as a way of ‘walking like Him’ (Jesus) is overdone, in particular his statement that ‘It [the Albigensian Crusade] was as crucial as the Fourth Lateran Council in promulgating the notion that anyone could attain this divine gift’; while his constant reference to crusaders playing the ‘holy game’ trivialises their genuine, if to our eyes misguided, endeavours. Pegg's iconoclastic approach leads to some very interesting ideas – in particular and extremely controversially, that no formal, structured ‘Cathar Church’ ever existed, an argument based on his belief that the ‘Charter of Niquinta’, detailing the Council of St Felix-de-Caraman of 1167, was a forgery. Certainly the nature of the evidence means that historians will forever argue about numbers of heretics and the structure, or lack of structure, of the Cathar heresy. But there is no doubt that popes far away in Rome genuinely thought that the beliefs of the ‘provinciales heretici’ posed a serious threat to both the theology and practice of orthodox Christianity and that they tried to address the problem of not just heretics, but their supporters, by a variety of short-term and long-term methods, of which the Albigensian Crusade was only one. Pegg himself acknowledges that ‘the Church feared heterodoxy’, although he dismisses this as ‘trivially true’. The downside is a tendency to oversimplify the Church's position rather than to analyse the highly complex mixture of political, religious and social motivations of individual popes, legates and southern-French clergymen. There is also too much emphasis placed on the Albigensian Crusade as a pivotal moment in medieval history. Pegg does not consider that although the idea of crusading against heretics was a new one, many contemporaries saw nothing particularly extraordinary about a bloody campaign to punish them. He provides no convincing arguments for his statement that ‘anti-semitism (rather anti-Judaism) in the Middle Ages only occurred after the Albigensian Crusade’, while his definition of the Albigensian Crusade as a genocide is misleading since the word suggests a degree of organisation and a systematised scheme for mass killing which is anachronistic and unsubstantiated by the sources. Many will disagree with Pegg's conclusions, but everyone should welcome his fresh and irreverent approach.