DISSINET
Dissident Networks Project

The “Dissident Networks Project” (DISSINET), hosted at Masaryk University’s Centre for the Digital Research of Religion, is a research initiative exploring dissident and inquisitorial cultures in medieval Europe from the perspective of social network analysis, geographic information science, and computational text analysis. It uses computational methods to shed new light on the social microstructure and spatiality of medieval dissident Christianities, on inquisitorial trials and records and, by extension, on medieval social networks, the functioning of covert networks, and the emergence of religion from local interactions.

DISSINET covers various heresy inquisitions in Languedoc from the 1230s to the 1320s; Lombardy and Tuscany from the 1240s to the 1300s; German-speaking areas from the 1390s to the 1430s; and England from the 1430s to the 1520s, thereby covering the diverse dissident cultures conventionally labelled as Cathars, Waldensians, Guglielmites, Beguins, Fraticelli, and Lollards.

For 2021-2026, the project has been awarded an ERC Consolidator grant. It builds on the progress already made by the project team under the funding of a Czech Science Foundation EXPRO grant (January 2019 to August 2021).

DISSINET in brief

the close and critical reading of sources combined with computational techniques of exploration, analysis, and visualisation;
a representative selection of medieval inquisitorial records and dissident religious cultures;
a focus on richly characterized relations and interactions between particular historical actors;
8,000 persons, 5,000 locations, 10,000 concepts, and 500,000+ relations (target volume by 2026);
outcomes in the form of articles, interactive maps and visualisations, software tools, and data.

News & Events

27 May

Did medieval inquisitors fear accusations of sexual misconduct?

It is a familiar image: a woman in distress, surrounded by men examining her soul in a dimly lit inquisitorial chamber. In fear of physical torture, she confesses to crimes she never committed. We bring you an online version of our article originally published in History Today.

10 Apr

Map: Heresy and occupation in Bologna around 1300

DISSINET has developed an interactive map of the occupations, dissident religious affiliations, and locations of residence of nearly 900 persons suspected of heresy in the inquisition register of Bologna, 1291–1310.

29 Mar

Towards a corpus of medieval inquisition records: First numbers

Building upon the invaluable work of modern editors, the DISSINET project is building a textual corpus of medieval inquisitorial material, which now contains 15 registers, totals over 1.6 million tokens, and ranges from North-Central Italy through Languedoc to England, and from the 1230s until the 1520s.

Data-snapshots

21 May

Variation and order in the stories of guilt in Peter Seila's register: From Seeing to Belief

The inquisitional register of Peter Seila (1241-2, Languedoc) is evidence of a thorough investigation trying to weigh the extent of guilt carefully. Allow detailed counting of individual misdeeds of 649 people.

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“Not only will DISSINET cover new ground in medieval studies and history; it will also help form a new generation of researchers who combine strong domain knowledge with a set of promising digital technologies.”
A peer review of the EXPRO grant application

The Dissident Networks Project (DISSINET) has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No. 101000442, project “Networks of Dissent: Computational Modelling of Dissident and Inquisitorial Cultures in Medieval Europe”).