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Inquisition and Power : Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc / John H. Arnold.

By: Material type: TextTextSeries: The Middle Ages SeriesPublisher: Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2013]Copyright date: ©2001Description: 1 online resource (328 p.)Content type:
Media type:
Carrier type:
ISBN:
  • 9780812236187
  • 9780812201161
Subject(s): DDC classification:
  • 272/.2/09448 21
LOC classification:
  • BX1720 .A76 2001eb
Other classification:
  • online - DeGruyter
Online resources: Available additional physical forms:
  • Issued also in print.
Contents:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Note on Texts and Translations -- Introduction -- PART I -- 1. The Lump and the Leaven -- 2. To Correct the Guilty Life -- 3. The Construction of the Confessing Subject -- PART II -- Introduction to Part -- 4. Questions of Belief -- 5. Sex, Lies, and Telling Stories -- Conclusion -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments
Summary: What should historians do with the words of the dead? Inquisition and Power reformulates the historiography of heresy and the inquisition by focusing on depositions taken from the Cathars, a religious sect that opposed the Catholic church and took root in southern France during the twelfth century. Despite the fact that these depositions were spoken in the vernacular, but recorded in Latin in the third person and rewritten in the past tense, historians have often taken these accounts as verbatim transcriptions of personal testimony. This belief has prompted some historians, including E. Le Roy Ladurie, to go so far as to retranslate the testimonies into the first-person. These testimonies have been a long source of controversy for historians and scholars of the Middle Ages.Arnold enters current theoretical debates about subjectivity and the nature of power to develop reading strategies that will permit a more nuanced reinterpretation of these documents of interrogation. Rather than seeking to recover the true voice of the Cathars from behind the inquisitor's framework, this book shows how the historian is better served by analyzing texts as sites of competing discourses that construct and position a variety of subjectivities. In this critically informed history, Arnold suggests that what we do with the voices of history in fact has as much to do with ourselves as with those we seek to 'rescue' from the silences of past.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Note on Texts and Translations -- Introduction -- PART I -- 1. The Lump and the Leaven -- 2. To Correct the Guilty Life -- 3. The Construction of the Confessing Subject -- PART II -- Introduction to Part -- 4. Questions of Belief -- 5. Sex, Lies, and Telling Stories -- Conclusion -- Abbreviations -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- Acknowledgments

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What should historians do with the words of the dead? Inquisition and Power reformulates the historiography of heresy and the inquisition by focusing on depositions taken from the Cathars, a religious sect that opposed the Catholic church and took root in southern France during the twelfth century. Despite the fact that these depositions were spoken in the vernacular, but recorded in Latin in the third person and rewritten in the past tense, historians have often taken these accounts as verbatim transcriptions of personal testimony. This belief has prompted some historians, including E. Le Roy Ladurie, to go so far as to retranslate the testimonies into the first-person. These testimonies have been a long source of controversy for historians and scholars of the Middle Ages.Arnold enters current theoretical debates about subjectivity and the nature of power to develop reading strategies that will permit a more nuanced reinterpretation of these documents of interrogation. Rather than seeking to recover the true voice of the Cathars from behind the inquisitor's framework, this book shows how the historian is better served by analyzing texts as sites of competing discourses that construct and position a variety of subjectivities. In this critically informed history, Arnold suggests that what we do with the voices of history in fact has as much to do with ourselves as with those we seek to 'rescue' from the silences of past.

Issued also in print.

Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.

In English.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 24. Apr 2022)