The Cathars (Lambert, Blackwell, 1998)

Malcolm Lambert was Reader in Medieval History at the University of Bristol. This 1998 Blackwell monograph is the first full-length English synthesis of Catharism, tracing the movement from its Rhineland and Balkan antecedents through its flowering in Languedoc and northern Italy to its destruction by crusade and inquisition. It draws on inquisitorial registers, chronicles and polemical sources, and its limit is the one the whole field shares: almost everything known about Cathar belief and organisation survives only through documents written by the movement's opponents.