Between 1664 and 1670 Jean de Doat was at work visiting archives in southern France and selecting documents to be transcribed by a team of scribes working under his direction. His commission was from Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and the two aims of copying were the conservation of the rights of the crown and to serve history. Many of the originals are no longer extant. Consequently the copies that were made – which were bound into 248 volumes now kept in the French national library – are of extraordinary interest to historians, as is also the matter of their transmission. How and why were some chosen and others not? Doat's only known writings are his reports on the mission addressed to Colbert's librarian. He listed achievements, criticised his employees and accounted for money. It is only the project-manager's compartment of his mind to which we have direct access.

This has dictated the indirect approach adopted in this chapter, which provides a close-up picture of just one visit made by Doat, to the Dominican convent in Toulouse in November 1668. It sketches the setting: the timing, the appearance and character of the convent at the time and what might have struck him about the place and the people in it.

The medieval archive

Raymond Gros of Toulouse turned up one spring morning in 1236 at the Dominican convent in Toulouse. He had been a full heretic (hereticus perfectus) for about twenty-two years, and now turned into a super-grass. He had so many beans to spill that the inquisitors authorised local chaplains to work alongside Dominican and Franciscan friars receiving his confession, writing it down over many days. The text was still there among the records of the Toulouse inquisitors in the early 1300s. The Dominican who saw it then, Bernard Gui, was a man inclined to laconic understatement. He just said it was big.

This is the story of these records in a nutshell. The early friars breathed the air of Toulouse: a city of notaries, authenticated documents and record-keeping. They were part of this culture and did likewise: wrote things, got them witnessed and kept them in an ever-growing archive. Around 1300, then, Gui had at his disposal a treasure house and in his dual capacity of inquisitor and historian he ransacked it.

Overture

In the late 1950s a London University student, Margaret Nickson, embarked on postgraduate research on a thirteenth-century Austrian inquisitor's treatise. After completion of her doctorate she got a job in the British Library, which was then located in the British Museum in Great Russell Street. One day she was leafing through one of the library's eighteenth-century catalogues and came across an astonishing entry. As she knew from her postgraduate days, one of the most important of all records of medieval heresy and inquisition was the massive Liber (Book) containing the sentences delivered in Toulouse between 1308 and 1323 by the inquisitor Bernard Gui. And one of the most famous stories was its fate. Although the manuscript had long since been lost its contents at least had been preserved, thanks to an edition printed in 1692. But what Nickson was reading contradicted the first part of this. The catalogue said the manuscript was in the British Library. She recounted what followed in the British Museum café in the late 1960s. She had run to the Manuscripts Room, quickly filled out an order slip and then counted the minutes. And then there it was, in front of her.

In the article she wrote on the manuscript's history she made particular use of John Locke's correspondence and journal in an account of the book's progress through the 1670s–90s. The protagonists were the Dutch Protestant theologian Philip van Limborch and Locke himself, two good friends who played crucial roles in the production of each other's work. Limborch helped Locke to get the first edition of his Letter on Toleration printed in Gouda in 1689. In turn Locke dedicated the Letter to Limborch and helped him with Gui's manuscript. Locke had known of it for many years and he played a leading role in bringing about what happened: the edition of Gui's Liber as an appendix to Limborch's Historia inquisitionis in 1692.

The concerns of this book are encapsulated here. In the early fourteenth century Gui's sentences had contained and constructed a certain sort of knowledge about people the Church labelled and persecuted as heretics.

Should we say ‘Goodbye’? For anglophone readers such a farewell was heralded by Mark Pegg's The Corruption of Angels, a monograph on inquisition and heresy in the Lauragais region of Languedoc, published in 2001. This paved the way for, and heavily influenced, the account of heresy in Languedoc contained in the second half of a book which has been at the forefront in the dismantling of Catharism since its publication in 2012, R. I. Moore's The War on Heresy. Since the two key terms historians use when talking about heresy in Languedoc (i.e. ‘Cathars’ and ‘Catharism’) are regarded as problematic in both books – and because we have to have a policy about words – we shall begin with words (§1 below). Discussion of The Corruption of Angels and The War on Heresy occupies the rest of the chapter. This is introduced by a lightning sketch of modern works, in order to place these books within the field (§2). The next section (§3) is devoted to The Corruption of Angels, while the one after (§4) discusses the general trajectory of Moore's earlier works on heresy. Then follow five sections providing closer examination of The War on Heresy's major themes. These are the Bulgars (§5), heresy in the Toulousain (§6), ivory-tower dualism (that is, the idea that dualism was projected onto heretics in the south by Cistercians and Paris theology, both largely detached from the real world) (§7), the alternative to this – local knowledge of the doctrines of heretics (§8) – and heretics’ bishops (§9). There are three appendixes: Appendix A is on names; Appendix B provides a brief summary of events at Montségur; Appendix C discusses the translation of two texts.

We begin with words. There was use of the word ‘Cathar’ in Languedoc in the early thirteenth century. The Waldensian Durand of Huesca wrote of ‘the Cathars who live in the dioceses of Albi and Toulouse and Carcassonne’. But this was rare. The fact that the word used in Languedoc was not usually ‘Cathar’ raises questions and a practical problem. Does modern historians’ use of the word ‘Cathar’ indicate their lack of awareness of the semantic problem? Does it lead insidiously to the attribution of unity and identity where there was none? In practice, what words should modern historians use?