Inquisition and Power Inquisition and Power
The Middle Ages Series

Inquisition and Power

Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc

    • $79.99
    • $79.99

Publisher Description

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.

GENRE
History
RELEASED
2013
July 20
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
328
Pages
PUBLISHER
University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
SELLER
University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
SIZE
1.6
MB

More Books by John H. Arnold

History: A Very Short Introduction History: A Very Short Introduction
2000
What is Medieval History? What is Medieval History?
2020
Inquisition and Power Inquisition and Power
2013
The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Christianity
2014

Other Books in This Series

A Knight's Own Book of Chivalry A Knight's Own Book of Chivalry
2013
Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain
2013
Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages Witchcraft and Magic in the Nordic Middle Ages
2011
Barbarian Tides Barbarian Tides
2010
The Romance of the Rose or Guillaume de Dole The Romance of the Rose or Guillaume de Dole
2015
Holy Warriors Holy Warriors
2012