Books on Dualism and other Medieval "Heresies"
The following are books dealing with the Dualism. ie Dualism in the religious sense that there are two principle gods, a god of good and a god of evil (Beware that Amazon and other searches will throw up books on the other kind of dualism, Cartesian Dualism, concerning the relationship between the mind and the brain)
Where there is an accompanying button, you can click on it to go the Amazon site, or in some cases other third party sites, to see more information, read reviews and purchase copies of the book in question.
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The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy
Yuri Stoyanov
The definitive work on Dualism.
If you have already read a few books on Catharism, have a grounding in theology and ancient history, and are still interested in learning more, then this is the book for you.
A very serious academic work., with 294 pages backed up by 126 pages of footnotes and a bibliography of 32 pages.
Take a look at the detailed reviews on Anazon - probably the best set of reviews for any book you've ever seen, including one by Sir Stephen Runciman.
Medieval Heresy - popular movements from Bogomils to Hus
Malcolm Lambert
The Medieval Manichee: a study of Christian dualist heresy
Sir Stephen Runciman
Written by few years ago, but still authoritative.
Sir Stephen was a highly respected historian, most famous for his classic work on the Crusades.
Heresies of the Middle Ages
Walter Wakefield & Austin Evans
Exellent history.
Wakefield and Evans have collected 60 documents from the period and translated extracts into English. Many "heresies" are covered, but most of the documents refer to Catharism under its many names. Each extract is set in context and there are extensive footnotes. Invuable for anyone seriously interested in the Cathars.
Inquisition and Medieval Society
James B. Given
The author focuses on three inquiries: what techniques of investigation, interrogation, and punishment the inquisitors worked out in the course of their struggle against heresy; how the people of Languedoc responded to the activities of the inquisitors; and what aspects of social organization in Languedoc either facilitated or constrained the work of the inquisitors.
Punishments not only inflicted suffering and humiliation on those condemned, he argues, but also served as theatrical instruction for the rest of society about the price of transgression.
Chasing the Heretics: A Modern Journey Through the Medieval Languedoc
Rion Klawinski
A combination of history and travel in Cathar country in the the south of France.
Articulate and readable; part history and part travelogue "discovering" the story of the pacifist Cathars, their beliefs and their extermination by the Roman Catholic Church.
The book also conveys a sense of daily life as it was lived almost eight hundred years ago (cf Le Roy de Ladurie's Montailou). As a bonus get a feeling for the mystic grandeur of the countryside and a flavour of the picturesque local villages rapidly being redeveloped by incoming Brits.
Christian Dualist Heresies in the Byzantine World, C.650-c.1450 (Manchester Medieval Studies)
Janet Hamilton, Bernard Hamilton
Dualism was a popular religion from the reign of Constans II (641-68).
It shared with other strands of Christianity an acceptance of scriptual authority and apostolic tradition, but understood all these in a radically different way from the Orthodox Church.
This text traces the origins of dualist Christianity within the Byzantine Empire, focusing on the Paulician movement in Armenia and Bogomilism in Bulgaria.
It presents the theological texts, and sets the Dualist movements into their social and political context.
Serious history - as you can tell just from the book cover!
Dualist Ideas in the English Pre-Reformation and Reformation (Bogomil-Cathar Influence on Wycliffe, Langland, Tyndale and Milton)
Georgi Vasilev
Publishers House Bulkoreni. Sofia, 2005. 140X210, 2 colour and 1 b/w illustrations, index, bibliography. In English. 212pp.
This thesis of this work is that the European Reformation was at least in part fuelled by Dualist ideas - an idea that previously been suspected but which could not be reliably sustained. Now Vasilev produce a wealth of evidence to support it.
This study argues that since the 12th century the presence of Dualist apocrypha in England is clearly identifiable, right up until the 17th and 18th centuries, for example in the works of John Milton and William Blake. It also traces in English culture a number of trends stemming from the Dualist Bogomil-Cathar "heresy".
Examples include the Lollards with their iconography, reformers John Wycliffe and William Tyndale, the poet William Langland, the apocryphal volume Cursor mundi, as well as the Anglo-Norman variants of The Legend of the Tree of the Cross and Les enfaunces de Jesus Christ, and John Milton's poems Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained.
Georgi Vasilev, Ph.D., D.Litt., Senior Researcher, is an expert at the State Agency for Bulgarians Abroad at the Council of Ministers, Bulgaria. He is member of the Bulgarian Society for British Studies, European Society for the Study of English, and Milton Society of France.
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