August 12th-14th
Centuries. Remembering
Catharism: BBC (45 Minutes)
Catharism
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss
the Cathars, a medieval European Christian sect accused of heresy. In 1215 Pope
Innocent III called the greatest meeting of Catholic minds for a hundred years.
He hoped that the Fourth Lateran Council would represent the crowning glory of
a Papacy that was more powerful than ever before, and it laid down decrees to
standardise Christian belief across the whole of Western Europe and heal the
papal schism of a generation before. But despite the wealth and power of the
Vatican, all was not as it should have been in the Catholic world; Jerusalem
was lost, the Crusades were failing, and in the regions of Europe the spectre
of heresy moved over the land. It loomed largest in the wealthy Languedoc
region of Southern France, where celibate vegetarians called Cathars were
proving more popular than Jesus.
The Pope moved against the
Cathars but why was Catharism such a threat, what were its beliefs and what was
the intellectual and spiritual climate that made the high middle ages the era
of the heretic?
With Malcolm Barber, Professor
of Medieval History at the University of Reading; Miri Rubin, Professor of
Medieval History at Queen Mary, University of London; Euan Cameron, Professor
of Modern History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.
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