The Corruption of Angels: The Great Inquisition of 1245-1246 Book

Pegg examines a manuscript, known as "manuscript 609", which is a partial copy of the transcripts from the Inquisition in Toulouse. He argues that the inquisitors defined people's identities based on actions rather than beliefs, and that thus identity was seen as relational; that through their questions they redefined how people saw themselves; and that to talk of any international heretical "Cathar" church in the thirteenth century is ridiculous. However, while he pays lip service to the problematics of writing history, he doesn't fully address them. For instance, he acknowledges that the scribes transcribing the answers people gave in the vernacular translated them into Latin, transforming their statements into stock phrases in the process. But then he goes on to draw conclusions from the similarity in different people's responses to the same questions. How can you know this similarity exists in anything other than the scribes translation?