IMC 2009: Sessions

Session 522: Heresy and the History of Religion

Organiser:	Mark Gregory Pegg, Department of History, Washington University in St Louis
Moderator/Chair:	Amanda Power, Department of History, University of Sheffield
Paper 522-a	Heresy and the People: The 1140s (Language: English) R. I. Moore, School of Historical Studies, Newcastle University Index terms: Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Religious Life, Social History
Paper 522-b	On Heresy, Orthodoxy, and the So-Called Nomothetic Religions (Language: English) Marina Rustow, Department of History, Emory University Index terms: Hebrew and Jewish Studies, Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Religious Life
Paper 522-c	Catharism and the Study of Religion (Language: English) Mark Gregory Pegg, Department of History, Washington University in St Louis Index terms: Crusades, Historiography - Modern Scholarship, Religious Life, Social History
Abstract	The three papers will each address the problem of how we approach the study of heresy in the Middle Ages in Christianity and Judaism (with some reflection on this problem in Islam). In each case the papers will question the prevailing assumptions about heresy and heretics - as in the existence of the Cathars, the origin of heresy in the 11th and 12th centuries, or the identity of the Qaraites in relation to Rabbinic Judaism - and how this reappraisal of the historiography of heresy demands a reappraisal of what we mean when we study the history of religion.