Who owns the Cathars? Medieval heretics, modern tourists, and the contestation of heritage in Occitanie
PhD Candidate: Grace Rinehart
Supervisor: (opens in a new window)Professor Tadhg O'Keeffe
Abstract
Catharism was a heretical Christian movement which appeared in Languedoc in
France in the eleventh century. A crusade against the Cathars was launched with papal
authority in the early thirteenth century. This crusade, known to historians as the Albigensian
Crusade, violently rooted out the movement within decades. To this day, Cathar history has
an important place in the identity of the people of the region – especially its rural parts –
where Catharism was strongest: Occitanie.
The modern landscape retains many vestiges of Cathar culture and its violent death. The
castles of the regional aristocrats who protected the Cathars, for example, are major heritage
sites. A proposal to have the castles of Cathar movement listed collectively as a World
Heritage Site with UNESCO, as part of the already existing Cité de Carcassonne listing, is an
opportunity for a critical assessment of the region’s heritage, tangible and intangible, but also
of the processes behind, and the ideologies which inform decisions about what constitutes
‘heritage’.
The heritage of Catharism is a contested heritage, and documenting and understanding this
contestation is the core of my proposed research. Some observations will help to make that
point. First, Cathar history is imagined in Occitanie as a history of regional separatism rather
than of Christian heresy. Second, the landscape heritage of Catharism is actually the
landscape of its destruction, with scars from the Albigensian Crusade across the region.
Third, the concept of ‘crusade’ is a most potent one today. Finally, modern tourists are
attracted to the region by another history, but this time a fake one: myths about the Knights
Templar and the Holy Grail, supposed heretics also, have congregated in the region, creating
a tension between ‘real’ history, already complex and problematic, and an invented past.
My study aims to disentangle these threads, thus contributing to the conversation of southern
French heritage on the one hand, and the ideology of the World Heritage Site idea on the
other.