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This chapter locates the Orvietans which are linked to Catharism within the bigger social and political context and compares them with what is known of the Cathars in Florence in the 1240s. It discusses the minor elites, furriers and artisans, and Florentine Cathars.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of Catharism. It then sets out the focus of the book, namely the Cathar community in the town of Orvieto. This book aims to provide a vivid evocation of the Cathars in one important community, to compare them with the Cathars from other towns, and to draw on that understanding to open larger questions about Italian Cathar belief and popular attitudes. It discusses two ways to study Catharism. First, one can reconstruct the social and political roles, motivations, and beliefs of the Cathars themselves. Second, one can analyze their repression: the ways their opponents defined them as heretics who threatened the whole of Christian society and then used that threat to reshape their own authority.

The spread of Cathar beliefs in Italy took place during the period of the collision of civic and ecclesiastical efforts at statebuilding. That conflict gave the Cathar movement a distinctive character. In the 13th century, political and religious ideas were interwoven: beliefs about the nature of the sacraments were closely linked to beliefs about the nature of authority. The brilliant pope Innocent III recognized this fact and directly tied his understanding of papal sovereignty to the definition of heresy. Therefore, the success of Catharism in Orvieto and the other Italian centers of the faith is best understood in the context of contemporary politics. This chapter explores the association between ecclesiastical statebuilding, the early Cathars, and efforts to repress them as heretics.

Only one contemporary reference to Orvietan Cathars survives from the first four decades of the 13th century. The faith did not die out during this period. The inquisitors of the mid-13th century were convinced that it persisted and considered a handful of individuals and families to be longstanding Cathars and the involvement of some houses to date back to the time of the murder. When the Franciscan inquisitors of 1268–9 pursued the Orvietan Cathars, the sentences they imposed were retrospective: they mentioned events long past and ancestors involved in heresy, and in some cases they convicted the dead. As a result, there is enough evidence to construct a list of a large part of the Orvietan Cathar community as it existed in the 1240s and 1250s. This chapter provides the context needed to make that list meaningful: a portrait of the social makeup and institutional structure of the larger community. It turns first to Orvietan society, drawing on tax surveys and wills to analyze something of the population, the distribution of wealth, and the patterns of family structure. Because scholars have argued that Cathar beliefs were spread through networks of clientage, the chapter considers the meager evidence for 13th-century urban clientage. Then, it looks at the crucial political transformation of the period, the rise of popular political institutions. The last section describes the failure of the early efforts against heresy.

This chapter explores the religious beliefs of Italian Cathars, in the context of contemporary skepticism and religious debate. It begins with giving some direct evidence for the beliefs of individual Cathars. First, the chapter gives a 1229 account of Cathar beliefs from an Italian perfect. Seconly, it gives an uncoerced statement from a literate and well-informed Cathar believer in Toulouse, Peter Garcias. Garcias, despite his distance from Orvieto, provides a clear look at a well-informed mid-13th-century Cathar. Having established a rough Cathar orthodoxy, the chapter turns to the more problematic belief of three Italians convicted of Catharism. The second section sets those beliefs in the broader context of contemporary religious debate and doubt.

This chapter explores three topics in Cathar understandings of male and female bodies, set against the background of contemporary Catholic belief. The first topic is sexual difference and lust. It explores ideas about sexual difference as stated and as practiced by Cathars. The second topic is marriage. One teaching common to virtually all Cathar texts is the condemnation of marriage and the procreation of children. Finally, the chapter turns from sexuality and marriage to a third focus of debate over the body: corpses. Catholic clerics did not directly attack dualist heresy by emphasizing the divine origins of human sexuality and consummation as the perfection of the sacrament of marriage. Instead, they answered heresy by stressing the ways in which corpses revealed sanctity or sin.

In 1268 an inquisition headed by a Franciscan, Fra Benvenuto, sentenced the Orvietan Cathars. In all, eighty-five people were sentenced, twenty-eight of them women. In eighteen cases—twelve men and six women—the inquisitors convicted the dead. This chapter examines the sentences of the 1268 inquisition and the problem of the repression of heresy in 13th-century Italy.

This chapter examines the ways in which the Orvietan commune, from the mid-1260s on, became identified with the papal curia and the celebration of the Corpus Domini feast. Ecclesiastical and civic authority became closely linked: men in high popular office were now more apt to be papal appointees than former Cathars. The town's ceremonies and processions in the late duecento and early trecento linked hierarchy and orthodoxy: in the Corpus Domini play, the town's popular executives, the Seven, accompanied by the clergy, carried the bloody altar cloths that constituted proof of transubstantiation to the pope. On the façade of the new cathedral, Lorenzo Maitani's workshop carved one of the masterpieces of early-14th-century sculpture, reliefs that portrayed in detail the sanctity of physical creation.

This chapter argues that papal infallibility in solemn canonization was the result of a dynamic process. From the papal perspective, the early 1170s saw two significant events in the history of Christian sainthood. The murder of St. Thomas Becket at Canterbury and the papal repudiation of the cult of St. Eric of Sweden were to have profound consequences for the development of canonization. They set in motion the centralization and solemnization of canonizations in the hands of the papacy, a long and arduous process that would not be completed for almost five centuries. This chapter first provides an overview of the social and cultural contexts of heresy in relation to the veneration of saints before discussing the elaboration of persons whom Cathars emphatically considered not to be in heaven. It also looks at the Waldensians' critique of the communion of the saints.