Overview
Catharism was a Christian quasi-dualist and pseudo-Gnostic movement in northern Italy and southern France between the 12th and 14th centuries. The existence and extent of Catharism is highly contested in contemporary scholarship, which since the 1990s has questioned the extent to which Catharism was an organized movement or even existed beyond a moral panic against an imagined enemy of the Church similar to later witch trials. Scholarship remains divided on the issue.