CATHARI DI LOMBARDIA. DOCUMENTAZIONE, TRASMISSIONE ERUDITA E DIBATTITO STORIOGRAFICO

The purpose of this work is to study cathars of Lombardy using four main ecclesiastical sources: the anonymous De heresi catharorum, the Summa contra catharos et valdenses of Moneta of Cremona, the Summa de catharis of Raniero of Piacenza and the Tractatus de hereticis written by Anselm of Alessandria. The first chapter of the first volume focuses on the Dominican historian Antoine Dondaine and his historiographical heritage about inquisition and heretics of the Middle age. Through a corpus of unpublished letters preserved at Saulchoir Library in Paris, the aim is to understand the context of his cultural formation and the origins of the controversy with the Italian historian Raffaello Morghen, an important debate of the past which is useful to evaluate the actual controversy on deconstructionism. The second chapter reconstructs the circulation and the reception of the De heresi catharorum and the Summa de catharis in order to identify the textual transformations of the two written and grasp the mentality of roman-catholic polemicists and inquisitors in writing antiheretical treatise. The study shows also a strong circulation during the Modern age when catholics and protestants used and preserved antiheretical texts for controversial purposes. From the historiographical object (Antoine Dondaine), passing through the circulation and diffusion of antiheretical texts during the modern and medieval period, we finally come to the historical object: cathars in Lombardy in the XIII century. The analysis of Moneta of Cremona’s treatise and the Tractatus of hereticis, once the polemician and inquisitorial filter is recognised, let us know some elements of doctrines and practices of heretics. The Summa contra catharos et valdenses, which has been studied from the privileged point of view of a BNF manuscript, give some more information about the lombard heretic called Desiderius. According to the latest suggestions about the importance to returning to texts, in the second volume, we propose new editions of the De heresi catharorum and the Summa de catharis. The written of Raniero is placed in the larger context of the Tractatus de hereticis. These editions present the variants of all manuscripts and, in the case of the Raniero’s account, reconsider the importance of the manuscript from Budapest which contains a more authentic version of the text.