The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246 (Pegg, Princeton, 2001)

Mark Gregory Pegg is a historian at Washington University in St Louis. This 2001 Princeton monograph works closely from the 1245-1246 inquisition register of Bernard de Caux, covering some five thousand people questioned across the Lauragais. From that ground-level record Pegg argues that the tidy, internationally organised "Cathar Church" of older scholarship is substantially a shape the inquisitors' own questions imposed on a more local and less doctrinally uniform world of good men and good women. Its limit is that it works from one register in one district and generalises from it; not every historian accepts the generalisation.