"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."--BOOK JACKET.