‘Stephen O’Shea certainly knows how to tall a story, and he has chosen a rousing tale to tell. Cruelty, loyalty, heroism, fanaticism and cynicism on an epic scale are its lifeblood … It is a story populated by knights and troubadours, saints and heretics, princes and the great anonymous crowds who suffered … Stephen O’Shea brings this lost world of the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries alive with stunning vividness.’

— Bernard Green, The Tablet

‘After nearly eight centuries, the memory — one might almost say the spirit — of the Cathars lives on in the land in which they lived, suffered and died. To anyone visiting the region for the first time, this book will be the ideal introduction to their story.’

— John Julius Norwich

‘The Perfect Heresy is the fascinating story of an unorthodox movement in the south of France from the twelfth to the fourteenth century. After its flowering, its ideas were destroyed in Languedoc by a crusade led by the king of France and the barons from the north of the country; the last remnants of Catharism came together in the village of Montaillou, in the Pyrenees, at the dawn of the fourteenth century. Stephen O’Shea’s book is the work of a connoisseur of Languedoc, is written for a wide readership, and draws on his personal experience of France’s southern region.’

— Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, author of Montaillou

‘Apart from a racy, vivid account of the Crusade and the events that followed, he offers an intelligent analysis of the heresy and the conflicting theories surrounding it … All the way O’Shea shows deep knowledge and love of the region. He writes with enthusiasm and immediacy of a contemporary chronicler … The book is unputdownable.’

— Suzanne Lowry, Spectator

‘A very well-informed and highly readable account of one of the great religous and social crises of the Middle Ages. The Cathars have found in Stephen O’Shea a persuasive and passionate chronicler. This is a book to enjoy and ponder.’

— Norman F. Cantor, Emeritus Professor of History, New York University, and author of Inventing the Middle Ages and Medieval Lives

Stephen O’Shea is a Canadian writer and historian. He has lived for long periods in Paris and New York, and moved to southern France to research and write The Perfect Heresy. His first book, Back to the Front: an accidental historian walks the trenches of World War I, was published to great acclaim and his latest book, Sea of Faith is a magnificent narrative of the contacts and conflicts between Islam and Christianity in the Mediterranean world over a thousand years. He now lives in Providence, Rhode Island.