Computing unity and diversity in the accounts of the Cathar initiation ritual
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| Year of publication | 2025 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | Our understanding of the consolament, the initiation ritual of the dissident religious group known as the Cathars, comes from various types of sources. Among the most significant are texts from service books that originate within Cathar communities: the Ritual of Florence and the Ritual of Lyon. Additionally, we have descriptions of the ritual from Catholic authors, as well as accounts from testimonies preserved in inquisitorial records, in which the deponents recount their memories of these ceremonies. Most descriptions come from Languedoc, with two from Italy, dating to the 13th and early 14th centuries. These texts differ significantly in their level of detail and complexity, making it challenging to identify common elements of the ritual and to identify similarities and differences. In the literature on the Cathar initiation ritual, the aforementioned service books are typically prioritized for understandable reasons, as other sources can appear incomplete or problematic in terms of their origins. In this paper, we aim to examine the entire body of available sources, focusing on the fundamental structural components of the ritual rather than the details. With the help of sequence analysis, which was firstly used by biologists to analyse DNA sequences and was later adopted by various fields including social sciences, we seek to uncover patterns in the structure of the ritual and to formally express both consistency and variation. |
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