This is an interesting, challenging and occasionally frustrating, book. Despite a title that appears to promise a narrow, perhaps recondite, essay, Caterina Bruschi has taken on some of the current major issues in the study of heresy. She has done so by focusing on what might at first glance seem to be a minor phenomenon, the itinerancy of the Cathar Good Men and Women and their believers in Languedoc in the mid-thirteenth century. Her arguments will probably not convince everyone, but they are interesting, and deserve serious attention.

The material for her study comes from volumes xxi–xxvi of the Collection Doat in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The Collection Doat contains seventeenth-century copies of original inquisitorial documents most of which have been lost. It has long been one of the chief resources for the study of heresy, particularly Catharism. These particular volumes largely include material from the mid-thirteenth century.

Bruschi sees herself as occupying a middle ground between what she portrays as two opposing ways of approaching inquisitorial documents and the history of the Cathar heresy. One way is a simple positivism that takes the inquisitorial records largely at face value, the other a radical scepticism that maintains that the records say more about the inquisitors than they do about any actual heretics. Her quarrel is, however, primarily with the more radical sceptics. They contend that there was no organised Cathar Church with a formal hierarchy and territorial divisions. They also contend that there is no real evidence before the thirteenth century that the Cathars of Languedoc had a dualist theology. Cathars were for the most part not so much heretics as individuals living pious lives of asceticism outside the framework of the Church, and thus a source of anxiety to that ever more defined and hierarchical institution. Indeed, if one believes the arguments advanced by Mark Pegg, it was, paradoxically, only as a result of persecution that Languedocian Cathars eventually adopted the dualist theology that their enemies had always attributed to them. Against this revisionist trend, which seems to be becoming a new orthodoxy, Bruschi argues that there was an organised Cathar Church with a dualist theology in southern France and northern Italy.

Bruschi is no simple-minded positivist. Indeed, her long discussion of the ‘filters’ that stand between us and the words of those interrogated by the inquisitors is one of the most careful and thorough that I have come across. But despite these filters, Bruschi believes that we can hear, through careful reading, actually hear, if only distantly, the hidden voices of the deponents.

Bruschi argues that there was a Cathar Church, and that itinerancy was central to it. The movements of Cathar Good Men and Women were not simply efforts to evade the inquisitors' dragnets. For the Cathars, as for many other heretics and indeed for orthodox Catholics, travel was considered a spiritual good, an imitation of Christ and his Apostles that allowed people to reach higher levels of perfection. Constant travel was also essential to keeping the Cathar Church alive. The Cathars may not have had physical churches, but they had an organisation. It was, however, an organisation that was ‘completely and intentionally one with no fixed abodes’ (p. 135). Instead the Church was organised around a network of private houses or hospices where the Cathar ‘clergy’, the Good Men and Women who had received the baptism of the Holy Spirit and were pledged to lives of strict asceticism, were hosted. These were not just hospices, but centres of community life for the Cathar Church. They were places where Good Men and Women rested, preached, and performed the rituals of their faith. Movement between houses was constant and essential to the management of the small clusters of brethren who made up the Church. Itinerancy was also central to the believers, those who had not been baptised but who supported the Good Men and Women. These people travelled to hear the Good Men preach or to attend the death-bed baptisms that they performed. This constant shuttling back and forth gave the Cathar Church coherence and the Cathars themselves a sense of belonging to territorial units. In maintaining this network, Bruschi emphasises the importance of the believers loosely referred to in the records as nuncii. These were people familiar with the local territory, its network of hospices. They were also people whose occupations required them to move around a good deal. They guided the Good Men on their journeys, carried their letters and the bread that they had blessed and acted at times as hosts. They also constituted a kind of travelling bank that moved funds around the network.

The other notion that the author combats is that those interrogated were helpless victims completely under the dominance of the inquisitors. For Bruschi, deponents were active agents in their trials. Both in court and out they measured the risk of their statements and devised strategies to minimise danger to themselves. Some saw their trials as opportunities ‘to reaffirm their own position in relation to the Church of Rome; an opening, a moment in which they could voice their own choice of alterity’ (p. 147).

Bruschi has many stimulating things to say, but she can be frustrating. A few of her assertions would benefit from either more evidence or more argument. The book's organisation is rather loose, and discussion of particular topics is often scattered across several chapters.

These problems, however, should not deter anyone from reading Bruschi's book. It is a useful and powerful argument against the trend that is inclined to see heresy as almost entirely the construct of church apologists and inquisitors, who attributed to dissidents practices and beliefs they did not actually have, and then persecuted them.