Albigenses in the Antipodes: An Australian and the Cathars

This article is a wide‐ranging discussion of the “conventional picture of Catharism” and why everything traditionally understood by most scholars about these heretics is wrong. It arises out of Peter Biller's criticism that, “as an Australian historian who works in the United States,” I am leading the “troops” in a sweeping campaign “to dismantle our picture of Catharism.” The stakes are high in this debate. If heresy is fundamentally misunderstood, then Latin Christianity is fundamentally misunderstood, and so what it means to study the medieval world is fundamentally misunderstood.