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4 Questions ofBelief Catharism andIts Contexts Pictures ofCatharisrn BE1WEEN I 277 AND 1279, Pierre Pictavin, an elderofthe village ofSoreze, was interrogated eight times by inquisitors. He talked in detail about Catharism in his locality, reporting the activities of himself and his neighbors. Among his statements, we find the following vignette, recounting a conversation from about u66: Item, he said that he heard Raymond de Camis ofMontxoy saying to him, "Sir, what worth is it to us whatever we do, whatever profit we make, if we cannot do what is fitting for us when it is needed, and have at our end what we need? Whatever good there was in this land has been thrown out and made foreign."1 This tiny fragment of reported speech- a Cathar supporter bewailing the problems of obtaining the consolamentum on one's deathbed- once again holds out to us the peculiarly historiographical pleasure of eavesdropping on the dead. But as I have argued in the first half of this book, these necrophiliac delights must be examined and questioned rather than simply embraced. We must consider what we might do with these confessional textual eventswhere they will lead us, and why. When Pierre Pictavin gave his depositions, he was an old man, possibly close to seventy years of age.2 His memories ofCatharism stretched back into the late 122os, focused on his home village and its environs. The different events he recalled for the inquisitors, the various "items" (as each is prefixed by the scribes), include occasions of Cathar preaching, deathbed "heretications" (where dying adherents received the consolamentum), meetings with the heretics , and the names of every person involved in such events. He also notes bequests left by the laity to the perfecti, along with other material support Questions ofBelief II7 supplied by the "believers" to the heretics, and further moments ofinteraction such as medical care provided by certain Cathar perfecti. There are thirty-six separate "items" in Pierre's deposition. Each one provides a particular nugget of information about Catharism, its supporters, its history, its shape within Soreze. So an historian might, ofcourse, decide to take these thirty-six items, put them together with further items drawn from other Soreze depositions, and begin to fashion a picture of Catharism. That is, we could begin a process of synthesis: building a larger picture from the snapshots provided by Pictavin and his fellow villagers. Ifwe were to perform this process with Pierre's deposition , we would find quite a lot that would support current historiographical pictures ofCatharism: for example, a narrative ofchange over time, from fairly frequent Cathar preaching and deathbed "heretications" in the 1230s and I240S, to a period when theperfecti were less active or present in the late 1250s and 126os, to the situation in the 1270s where theperfecti were based in Lombardy and only visiting Languedoc infrequently. Taking the names ofall those mentioned by Pictavin, we might map the extent of Cathar support within Soreze; and place this map against other localities, to gain a wider picture of Cathar "believers" in Languedoc. Looking at Pictavin's own involvement in the heresy, we might also find support for particular historiographical theories about Catharism and its context, such as the importance of familial connections : for example, of the seven deathbed "heretications" attended by Pierre, five involved members of his extended family and friends, and he was taken along to the other two by his master when he was an apprentice.3 Overall, then, we might say that Pictavin's information on Catharism thus supports an accepted picture of the heresy: a hierarchical and symbiotic structure, where the elite perfecti tend to the spiritual needs of the "believers" via a few, key rituals, and the "believers" support theperfecti in practical and material ways, this support indicating their beliefin the "good men.'' Pictavin's chronological narrative also fits within historiographical consensus: a Church-like Catharism in the pre-Crusade period, with its own bishops and deacons, declining over the course ofthe thirteenth century, as the process of inquisition attacked the social and familial bonds on which the heresy depended, until it ended with a whimper in the local and disorganized Autier revival of the early fourteenth century. These are valid pictures of Catharism, and it is not my intention here to try to demolish them; rather, I want to explore what might complement our existing image ofthe heresy ifwe adopt a change offocus and a degree ofselfquestioning . I would like to consider further what inquisitorial discourse takes...

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