Mark Gregory Pegg's Books

A Most Holy War

The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom

By: Mark Gregory Pegg

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A Most Holy War

The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom

By: Mark Gregory Pegg

In January of 1208, a papal legate was murdered on the banks of the Rhone in southern France. A furious Pope Innocent III accused heretics of the crime and called upon all Christians to exterminate heresy between the Garonne and Rhone rivers--a vast region now known as Languedoc--in a great crusade. This most holy war, the first in which Christians were promised salvation for killing other Christians, lasted twenty bloody years--it was a long savage battle for the soul of Christendom. In A Most Holy War, historian Mark Pegg has produced a swift-moving, gripping narrative of this horrific crusade, drawing in part on thousands of testimonies collected by inquisitors in the years 1235 to 1245. These accounts of ordinary men and women, remembering what it was like to live through such brutal times, bring the story vividly to life. Pegg argues that generations of historians (and novelists) have misunderstood the crusade; they assumed it was a war against the Cathars, the most famous heretics of the Middle Ages. The Cathars, Pegg reveals, never existed. He further shows how a millennial fervor about "cleansing" the world of heresy, coupled with a fear that Christendom was being eaten away from within by heretics who looked no different than other Christians, made the battles, sieges, and massacres of the crusade almost apocalyptic in their cruel intensity. In responding to this fear with a holy genocidal war, Innocent III fundamentally changed how Western civilization dealt with individuals accused of corrupting society. This fundamental change, Pegg argues, led directly to the creation of the inquisition, the rise of an anti-Semitism dedicated to the violent elimination of Jews, and even the holy violence of the Reconquista in Spain and in the New World in the fifteenth century. All derive their divinely sanctioned slaughter from the Albigensian Crusade. Haunting and immersive, A Most Holy War opens an important new perspective on a truly pivotal moment in world history, a first and distant foreshadowing of the genocide and holy violence in the modern world.

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284

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0199721513

ISBN 13

9780199721511

The Corruption of Angels

The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246

By: Mark Gregory Pegg

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The Corruption of Angels

The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246

By: Mark Gregory Pegg

Mark Gregory Pegg examines the sole surviving manuscript of this great inquisition with unprecedented care - often in unexpected ways - to build a richly textured understanding of social life in southern France in the early thirteenth century."--BOOK JACKET.

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238

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ISBN 10

0691006563

ISBN 13

9780691006567

A Most Holy War

The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom

By: Mark Gregory Pegg

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A Most Holy War

The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom

By: Mark Gregory Pegg

Historian Pegg has produced a swift-moving, gripping narrative of a horrific crusade, drawing in part on thousands of testimonies collected by inquisitors in the years 1235 to 1245. These accounts of ordinary men and women bring the story vividly to life.

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284

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Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0195393104

ISBN 13

9780195393101

The Corruption of Angels

The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246

By: Mark Gregory Pegg

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The Corruption of Angels

The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246

By: Mark Gregory Pegg

On two hundred and one days between May 1, 1245, and August 1, 1246, more than five thousand people from the Lauragais were questioned in Toulouse about the heresy of the good men and the good women (more commonly known as Catharism). Nobles and diviners, butchers and monks, concubines and physicians, blacksmiths and pregnant girls--in short, all men over fourteen and women over twelve--were summoned by Dominican inquisitors Bernart de Caux and Jean de Saint-Pierre. In the cloister of the Saint-Sernin abbey, before scribes and witnesses, they confessed whether they, or anyone else, had ever seen, heard, helped, or sought salvation through the heretics. This inquisition into heretical depravity was the single largest investigation, in the shortest time, in the entire European Middle Ages. Mark Gregory Pegg examines the sole surviving manuscript of this great inquisition with unprecedented care--often in unexpected ways--to build a richly textured understanding of social life in southern France in the early thirteenth century. He explores what the interrogations reveal about the individual and communal lives of those interrogated and how the interrogations themselves shaped villagers' perceptions of those lives. The Corruption of Angels, similar in breadth and scope to Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou, is a major contribution to the field. It shows how heretical and orthodox beliefs flourished side by side and, more broadly, what life was like in one particular time and place. Pegg's passionate and beautifully written evocation of a medieval world will fascinate a diverse readership within and beyond the academy.

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Page Count

249

Publisher

Princeton University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1400824753

ISBN 13

9781400824755

Beatrice's Last Smile

A New History of the Middle Ages

By: Mark Gregory Pegg

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Beatrice's Last Smile

A New History of the Middle Ages

By: Mark Gregory Pegg

Beatrice's Last Smile is a sweeping narrative history of the medieval west from the beginning of the third century to the beginning of the sixteenth. This book focuses on slow formation of Latin Christendom over a millennium in the aftermath of the disintegration of the western Roman Empire. Beatrice's Last Smile is a sweeping narrative history of the medieval west from the beginning of the third century to the beginning of the sixteenth. The reader travels from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, from the Nile to the Volga, from north Africa to the central Asia, until finally ending in the Americas. Through a focus on slow formation of Latin Christendom over a millennium in the aftermath of the disintegration of the western Roman Empire, Beatrice's Last Smile is a history of holiness which includes Judaism and the revelations of Muhammad. The narrative moves from the violence within fifth-century Britain and Gaul to the Hundred Years War between England and France, from the plague of the sixth century to the Black Death of the fourteenth, from the first crusaders sacking Jerusalem to the Spanish capturing Tenochtitlán, from Viking raids to Mongol invasions, from the inquisitons into heresy to the trials of witches, from a third-century Christian mother dying in a Roman arena to the immolation of Joan of Arc in the fifteenth, from an ancient universe without heaven and hell to a medieval cosmos with a fiery inferno and a shimmering paradise. Over these centuries there is an emphasis on individual men and women and their stories woven together with the story of the emergence of a distinctive western culture.

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Page Count

521

Publisher

Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0192575562

ISBN 13

9780192575562

Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe

By: Mark A. Waddell

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Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe

By: Mark A. Waddell

An accessible new exploration of the vibrant world of early modern Europe through a focus on magic, science, and religion.

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Page Count

231

Publisher

Cambridge University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1108425283

ISBN 13

9781108425285

Book's by Mark Gregory Pegg

A Most Holy War

A Most Holy War

The Corruption of Angels

The Corruption of Angels

A Most Holy War

A Most Holy War

The Corruption of Angels

The Corruption of Angels

Beatrice's Last Smile

Beatrice's Last Smile

Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe

Magic, Science, and Religion in Early Modern Europe

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