Mountaillou’s randy priest – and secret Cathar. I had met her and Pierre and the 200 other residents of the mountain village in the pages of a book by the French historian Emmanuel Le Roy ...

Burnham—known for her nonfiction work A Book of Angels—paints a vivid picture of the Cathars’ struggles. Despite doses of Hollywood melodrama—one minute Jeanne can’t live without William; the next she ...

Catharism sprang up again 100 years later, a little to the south, in and around the Pyrenean village of Montaillou. It was made famous by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's 1978 book, based on the ...

Cathar books were destroyed, and so almost all that we know of Catharism comes from the meticulous documentation of Dominican inquisitors. The Cathars themselves went into the flames or were ...

Cathars also didn’t believe in the paying of tithes, which, of course, infuriated the church. Why feature them in a whodunit? My editor in London, Peter Carson, to whom the book is dedicated ...