Chance meetings can be the best ones. Last summer, my wife and I attended the CHAP (Christian Homeschool Association of Pennsylvania) Convention. While browsing the exhibitor boots, a map of southern France caught my eye. Intrigued, I stepped closer to his publisher’s booth, where Andrew Lambdin was representing his books.

Among the Christian books on display, I noticed two novels by Mr. Lambdin himself: Hills of Zion and Fields of Zion. As a Christian author writing in a similar historical setting, I had to ask him who his books were about. When he told me his books take place in the thirteenth century, during the Albigensian Crusade, I was stunned.

Folk stories and songs shape culture. What would the United States be without Davy Crocket and Daniel Boone, England without Robin Hood, Scotland without William Wallace, or France without Joan of Arc? They embody the national spirit and provide legends passed down from parents to children through the generations.

During my ongoing study of the Waldensians, it’s easy to get bogged down in historical dates, names, and places, but miss the intricacies of daily life. They were (and are) a people with a name and even their own language. Yes, they have a written history dispersed across a few dozen books, pamphlets, and tracts. But the Waldensians also have songs, legends, myths, and poems—the kinds of culture parents teach their children and that have survived intact through centuries of oppression.