Malcolm Gladwell's 2000 bestseller The Tipping Point posited that trends, from fashion fads to intellectual notions, are much like epidemics, which start small and spread as more people come in contact with them. Though Gladwell presented a compelling argument, and his novel ideas have become their own kind of epidemic, The Tipping Point is itself a new strain of an old notion. The medieval church had a similar understanding of the way ideas might spread if left unchecked, and it fought to preserve its central beliefs by eliminating competing ideas with the rough aggression of a pre-modern surgeon hacking away at a cancer. In this first novel by Charmaine Craig, three generations rise and fall in Montaillou, a hotbed of heresy in the late 13th and early 14th centuries. Calling themselves Good Christians, the heretics of the southern French town subscribe to a version of Christianity that pushes the Catholic Church's distrust of the flesh to an extreme: They view all material objects as the creation of Satan, and refuse to believe that Jesus ever took bodily form. Practicing their faith in secret, the Good Christians find a sympathetic figure in Pierre Clergue, a dwarfish rector whose physical limitations make him somewhat predisposed to the Good Christians' message. But the sexual favors of a wealthy patron buy his silence, encapsulating the conflict that drives Craig's book: the war between intellectual and spiritual principles, and the undeniability of the body. Sooner or later, their historically specific incarnation of the conflict between spirit and flesh undoes one character after another. From the wife of a Good Christian who takes his sect's hatred of flesh to its self-loathing extreme to the son of a doctor whose love of a classmate fills him with both shame and joy, the characters are destroyed not by the spread of sin, but by monolithic righteousness. What The Good Men lacks in momentum it makes up for in detail and psychological insight. Inspired by the 1320 deposition of Grazida Lizier—a peasant who, accused of lechery and unwitting incest, insisted she did not consider herself a sinner—Craig recreates the world leading to Lizier's testimony. It's a place in which doctrine and instinct clash not only in the corridors of power, but in byways and kitchens.