The war against heresy in medieval Europe

Both the level of clerical anxiety about popular heresy in the century or so after 1140 and the breadth and vigour of measures adopted to suppress it, initially in the Languedoc, were disproportionate to its extent, coherence and support. This article therefore seeks an alternative explanation for the launching of the 'war against heresy' in thirteenth-century Europe, and finds it primarily in the developing self-consciousness of the new administrative elite produced by the demographic and cultural transformation of Europe in the eleventh century.