The War on Heresy
Notes and Bibliography
To friends, colleagues and reviewers (including those who are all three) :
The decision that The War on Heresy shouldcarry only minimal notes in place of a full academic apparatus was mine. It was not even suggested, let alone imposed, by Profile, who have been the most generous and forebearing of publishers. I made it because though I have never understood why the non-academic reader (perhaps more in the UK than the US) is put off by the sight of proper notes and a respectable bibliography - nobody makes him read them - I have reluctantly come to believe that it is the case. The War on Heresy was conceived in exasperation that railway and airport bookstalls, and even quite serious bookshops, almost never have anything to offer on medieval European history except books on the crusades. As some of you may know I do not regard this as the aspect of the subject that the reading public most needs to know about, or as the one in which the current state of our art has reached its highest point. So when I also noticed that the occasional exceptions tended to feature heretics, especially ‘Cathars’, though not in treatments that I could recommend, it seemed time to put my money, or at any rate my Mac, where my mouth was. My idea was to knock off in a year or so a lightweight version of what I knew so well, because I had been saying it for so long. It didn’t work out that way. As so many wiser heads than mine have known, once you start again at the beginning you are on a new road. If I had realised from the outset how different this story was going to be I would have taken my proposal to a UP and swaddled it in footnotes and appendices. I am very glad that I did not. John Davey’s comment on my first draft of the Prologue and first chapter – which I thought a triumph of popularisation – was ‘People don’t want to know what didn’t happen.’ Taken seriously (and ruthlessly reinforced by AER’s astonishing ability to simulate total ignorance and philistinism) this maxim was subversive of everything that a lifetime of pedagogy has – for the best of reasons – made second nature. It also makes it very difficult to evade issues. It has certainly made this, from a strictly academic point of view, a much better and more searching piece of work than it would otherwise have been. Whether I have learned it well enough to make the airport bookstalls remains to be seen