Darkness Visible: Nature, Superstition, and Miracles in the Historia Albigensis of Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay

The Albigensian Crusade was predicated on the threat posed to the Catholic order in the Midi, or the south of modern France, by a heresy which strictly separated the physical and the spiritual, condemning the former as evil and embracing the latter as good. The Historia albigensis, a contemporary account of the crusade written by a fervent partisan, the Cistercian monk Peter of Vaux-de-Cernay, excoriates this dualist theology. However, Peter also condemns the tendency, which he claims is especially current among the southern opponents of the crusade, to put a superstitious faith in natural signs such as dreams, sneezes, or the flight of birds. This chapter will address the apparent contradiction in Peter’s portrayal of southern society: a culture given over to an ascetic hatred of the physical world, yet obsessed with the import of natural phenomena. By placing Peter’s treatment of superstition within a wider context of ecclesiastical and scholastic condemnation and examining his descriptions of southern beliefs, we can better understand both reforming orthodox attitudes towards popular deviance and the strategies he employs to justify violent intervention in the Midi.