As cliche´d as it now is to see the Albigensian Crusade as a war against the Cathars, such a proposition was new around 1900. Until then the crusade was, rather straightforwardly, regarded as a campaign against the ‘‘Albigensians.’’ The legendary eleventh edition (1910) of the Encyclopaedia Britannica deftly illustrates (as it does with so much Victorian-intoEdwardian thought) the scholarly metamorphosis of Albigenses into Cathari. Both heretics have entries (an editorial concession that, even when ideas change, old notions persist), and, while each essay is erudite, ‘‘Albigenses’’ (by a Frenchman) is clearly the musty antecedent that ‘‘Cathars’’ (by an Englishman) so exuberantly supersedes